Purpose

This paper seeks to identify some of the most important drivers of Portuguese local government transparency in their activities over time. The recent literature on good governance has repeatedly identified transparency as central to promoting accountability, preventing corruption and mismanagement and stimulating greater civic engagement. As local government is the main provider of many primary services to the population, evaluating its transparency is especially relevant given that misconduct or maladministration will have a strong impact on the population's well-being. Given increased diffusion of European good governance norms and practices, the authors believe the Portuguese case to be relevant across the EU.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors develop a dynamic panel data model to evaluate the simultaneous influence of both political and contextual variables on the municipal transparency index (MTI) in 308 Portuguese municipalities during the period from 2013 to 2017.

Findings

The results suggest support for previous studies that found increased Internet enabled transparency in municipalities with low levels of indebtedness (per capita), are more highly populated, are governed by left-wing parties, demonstrating higher levels of financial efficiency. The urban/rural status, measured by population density, is not a significant predictor.

Originality/value

The paper seeks to confirm earlier analyses of these same data over a longer period of years to substantiate the validity of those findings. This is important especially in the context of the political variable, to demonstrate it was not necessarily a particular collection of left-wing mayors, but that the relationship holds over time, across administrations, because the dataset covers two election periods.

中文翻译：

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人口，政治和财政因素对市政透明度的影响：动态面板方法

目的

本文旨在确定葡萄牙地方政府随着时间推移开展活动的透明度的一些最重要的驱动因素。最近关于善治的文献反复地将透明度视为促进问责制，防止腐败和管理不善以及促进公民参与的关键。由于地方政府是为人口提供许多基本服务的主要提供者，因此评估其透明度尤其重要，因为行为不当或管理不善会对人口的福祉产生重大影响。鉴于欧洲善治规范和实践的传播日益广泛，作者认为葡萄牙案在整个欧盟都具有重要意义。

设计/方法/方法

作者开发了一个动态面板数据模型来评估2013年至2017年期间政治和背景变量对308个葡萄牙市政当局的市政透明度指数（MTI）的同时影响。

发现

结果表明对以前的研究的支持，这些研究发现，负债率较低（人均）的市镇中，互联网启用的透明度提高了，人口稠密，由左翼政党统治，这表明财务效率更高。用人口密度衡量的城市/农村状况不是重要的预测指标。

创意/价值

本文力图确认在更长的时间内对这些相同数据的早期分析，以证实这些发现的有效性。这一点在政治变量的背景下尤其重要，以证明它不一定是左翼市长的特定集合，而是这种关系随着时间的推移在各个政府部门之间都存在，因为数据集涵盖两个选举时期。