Transparency is popularly believed to enhance the public's trust in government, yet experimental studies have found mixed results. One explanation is that public trust may respond more positively to a kind of “latent transparency” in which citizens highly value the mere potential for open access to government information, even if they may have more negative reactions when presented with the particular content of actual government information, documents, or data. To test this hypothesis, we designed two survey experiments in which samples of US adults were primed with general information about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or the existence of open government data.

Compared to controls, we find that awareness of FOIA rights and requirements (latent transparency) tended to be unrelated, or even slightly negatively related, to trust of government agencies, contrary to our expectations. Our findings, combined with prior evidence, suggest that—even in the case of latent transparency—the popular belief in transparency's positive effects on citizen trust needs a more critical examination. Implications for the theory and practice of transparency are discussed.

人们普遍认为，透明度可以增强公众对政府的信任，但是实验研究却得出了不同的结果。一种解释是，公众信任可能会对一种“潜在的透明度”做出更积极的反应，在这种情况下，公民高度重视公开获取政府信息的潜力，即使当他们面对实际政府的特定内容时可能会有更多的负面反应。信息，文件或数据。为了检验该假设，我们设计了两个调查实验，在这些实验中，美国成年人样本被充填了有关信息自由法（FOIA）或存在公开政府数据的一般信息。

与控制相比，我们发现对FOIA权利和要求的意识（潜在的透明性）与政府机构的信任无关，甚至与它们之间的负面影响微乎其微，这与我们的预期相反。我们的发现，再加上先前的证据，表明，即使在潜在的透明性的情况下，人们普遍认为透明性对公民信任的积极影响还需要进行更严格的审查。讨论了对透明度的理论和实践的启示。