Abstract

In our paper, we concentrate on proactive transparency, provision of data without prior information requests. To do so, we collected data from all 2,926 municipalities in Slovakia and analyze political, economic, and social factors that affect the proactive transparency of these local bodies. This case selection provides two advantages. First, we study a relatively new democracy, where proactive transparency has not been analyzed so far. Second, our sample size is substantially larger than samples in most existing studies, and unlike in the case of the majority of previous research, we focus on a country with a highly fragmented municipal structure, where most municipalities have a small population. We find that a higher population, lower unemployment and female municipal leadership enhance the level of proactive transparency. The results also show a connection between reactive and proactive transparency at the local level. In general, our findings indicate that municipalities with a small population face substantial obstacles in disclosing information to the public.

摘要

在我们的论文中，我们专注于主动透明度，即在没有事先信息请求的情况下提供数据。为此，我们收集了斯洛伐克所有 2,926 个城市的数据，并分析了影响这些地方机构主动透明度的政治、经济和社会因素。这种情况下的选择有两个好处。首先，我们研究了一个相对较新的民主制度，其中迄今为止尚未分析过主动透明度。其次，我们的样本量比大多数现有研究中的样本大得多，而且与之前的大多数研究不同，我们关注的是一个市政结构高度分散的国家，其中大多数城市的人口很少。我们发现更多的人口、更低的失业率和女性市政领导层提高了主动透明度的水平。结果还显示了地方层面的被动和主动透明度之间的联系。总的来说，我们的调查结果表明，人口较少的城市在向公众披露信息方面面临重大障碍。