Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to assess if the extent of openness and the coverage of data sets released by European governments have a significant impact on citizen trust in public institutions.

Design/methodology/approach

Data for openness and coverage have been collected from the Open Data Inventory 2018 (ODIN), by Open Data Watch; institutional trust is built up as a formative construct based on the European Social Survey (ESS), Round 9. The relations between the open government data features and trust have been tested on the basis of structural equation modelling (SEM).

Findings

The paper reveals that as European governments improve data openness, disaggregation, and time coverage, people tend to trust them more. However, the size of the effect is still small and, comparatively, data coverage effect on citizens’ confidence is more than twice than the impact of openness.

Research limitations

This paper analyzes the causal effect of Open Government Data (OGD) features captured in a certain moment of time. In upcoming years, as OGD is implemented and a more consistent effect on people is expected, time series analysis will provide with a deeper insight.

Practical implications

Public officers should continue working in the development of a technological framework that contributes to make OGD truly open. They should improve the added value of the increasing amount of open data currently available in order to boost internal and external innovations valuable both for public agencies and citizens.

Originality/value

In a field of knowledge with little quantitative empirical evidence, this paper provides updated support for the positive effect of OGD strategies and it also points out areas of improvement in terms of the value that citizens can get from OGD coverage and openness.

中文翻译：

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政府数据的开放性和覆盖范围。它们如何影响欧洲国家的信任？

摘要

目的

本文旨在评估开放性程度和欧洲政府发布的数据集覆盖范围是否对公民对公共机构的信任有重大影响。

设计/方法/方法

Open Data Watch从Open Data Inventory 2018（ODIN）收集了开放性和覆盖率数据; 机构信任是根据第9轮欧洲社会调查（ESS）建立的一种形成性构造。开放政府数据特征与信任之间的关系已经在结构方程模型（SEM）的基础上进行了测试。

发现

该文件显示，随着欧洲各国政府改善数据开放性，分类和时间覆盖范围，人们倾向于更加信任它们。但是，影响的规模仍然很小，相对而言，数据覆盖范围对公民信心的影响是开放性影响的两倍以上。

研究局限性

本文分析了在特定时刻捕获的开放政府数据（OGD）功能的因果关系。在未来的几年中，随着OGD的实施以及对人们的期望会产生更一致的影响，时间序列分析将提供更深刻的见解。

实际影响

公职人员应继续致力于技术框架的开发，以使OGD真正开放。他们应提高目前可用的开放数据量的附加值，以促进对公共机构和公民都有价值的内部和外部创新。

创意/价值

在缺乏定量经验证据的知识领域中，本文为OGD策略的积极效果提供了最新的支持，并且还指出了公民从OGD覆盖范围和开放性中可以获得的价值方面的改进领域。