Cross-Country Heterogeneity in Government Transparency and Citizens’ Political Efficacy: A Multilevel Empirical Analysis
| Author | Lorenzo Cicatiello,Giuseppe Lucio Gaeta,Elina De Simone |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0095399716666356 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2016
Article
Administration & Society
2018, Vol. 50(4) 595 –623
Cross-Country
© The Author(s) 2016
https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399716666356
DOI: 10.1177/0095399716666356
Heterogeneity
journals.sagepub.com/home/aas
in Government
Transparency and
Citizens’ Political
Efficacy: A Multilevel
Empirical Analysis
Lorenzo Cicatiello1, Elina De Simone2,
and Giuseppe Lucio Gaeta1,3
Abstract
Using cross-country data from the Citizenship database of the 2004
International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and relying on multilevel mixed-
effects modeling, we investigate the link between government transparency
and citizens’ external political efficacy. Results indicate that transparency
enhances the perception of institutions’ responsiveness to citizens’ actions,
but also highlight that this effect is mediated by citizens’ level of education.
In particular, while for better educated people the magnitude of government
transparency’s effect on citizens’ external efficacy is substantial, the same effect
is negligible for less educated citizens who appear to be “lost in transparency.”
Keywords
government transparency, accountability, political efficacy
1University of Naples l’Orientale, Italy
2Parthenope University of Naples, Italy
3cMet05 Inter-University Centre for Applied Economic Studies on Industrial Policy, Local
Development and Internationalization, Italy
Corresponding Author:
Giuseppe Lucio Gaeta, Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples
l’Orientale, Largo San Giovanni Maggiore 30, Naples 80134, Italy.
Email: glgaeta@unior.it
596
Administration & Society 50(4)
Introduction
Following Denemark and Niemi (2012, p. 1), “One of the most striking pat-
terns in contemporary studies of political attitudes is the increasing perva-
siveness of citizen distrust and disengagement from the political process.”
The perceived unresponsiveness of governments to the interests of citizens is
one of the major driving forces behind the detachment of citizens from poli-
tics, which erodes the legitimacy of governments and undermines the sur-
vival of democratic institutions. Asymmetries of information between
political authority and citizens and the consequent principal–agent problems
contribute strongly to this process; many scholars have accordingly focused
on the beneficial effects of transparency.
Transparency, usually meant as “data dissemination and availability of
information concerning government decisions” (Hollyer, Rosendorff, &
Vreeland, 2011), has become a milestone of contemporary public governance
(Heald, 2006; Hood, 2001; Khagram, Fung, & De Renzio, 2013; Roberts,
2006; Stiglitz, 2002). It is claimed to contribute to a range of positive out-
comes, among which is the capacity of eroding the disparity between gover-
nors and citizenry by easing citizens’ observability of government actions
and performances (Stiglitz, 2002).
Observability creates an incentive for the agent (government) to be less
corrupt, more efficient, and responsive to citizens’ needs and actions (Fung,
Graham, & Weil, 2007; Heald, 2006; Roberts, 2006). Indeed by making the
agent “accountable for the consequences of his actions” (Forssbaeck &
Oxelheim, 2014), transparency is claimed to have a positive impact on indi-
viduals’ political attitudes.
A greater accountability is supposed to impact on citizens’ beliefs about
democratic processes, for instance trust, legitimacy, and satisfaction with
government. A number of articles have empirically investigated this linkage
(Bauhr & Grimes, 2014; de Fine Licht, 2014; Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer,
2014; Grimmelikhuijsen, Porumbescu, Hong, & Im, 2013; Tolbert &
Mossberger, 2006; Welch, Hinnant, & Moon, 2005). Nevertheless, in this
article the impact of transparency on citizens’ political attitudes is pushed a
step forward. As observability and accountability may induce the govern-
ment not to exploit information asymmetry, and to act in a way that fits citi-
zens’ needs, transparency may end up affecting citizens’ perception of having
an influence on the political processes, that is political efficacy.
The seminal contribution by Campbell, Gurin, and Miller (1954) defines
citizens’ political efficacy as the “feeling that individual political action does
have, or can have, an impact upon the political process” (p. 187). While it has
been initially analyzed as a single construct (Morrell, 2003), the concept of
Cicatiello et al.
597
political efficacy has been later split by scholars (Craig & Maggiotto, 1982;
Niemi, Craig, & Mattei, 1991; Sullivan & Riedel, 2001) into two different
concepts referring to citizens’ perception of
•• their own potential impact on the political process resulting from their
own skills and confidence, which is their internal political efficacy
(Sullivan & Riedel, 2001), and
•• political institutions’ responsiveness to their actions in the political
process, which is their external political efficacy (Abramson &
Aldrich, 1982).
As it emerges from these definitions, whereas internal political efficacy is
mostly related to people’s feelings (Almond & Verba, 1963), external politi-
cal efficacy is more system-focused, as it mostly refers to individuals’ per-
ception of systemic features (Abramson & Aldrich, 1982; Converse, 1972).
For this reason, this study will only focus on citizens’ external political effi-
cacy, as it is presumably correlated with institutional features such as govern-
ment transparency (Coglianese, Kilmartin, & Mendelson, 2009). Indeed, in
countries where accurate and up-to-date information about government activ-
ities is provided, policy makers’ behavior is open to wide public scrutiny and
assessment. This enhanced accountability gives rise to an incentive for the
government to act according to citizens’ preferences. As a consequence, citi-
zens develop strong feelings that decision makers are responsive to them.
Conversely, in countries where low information about government behavior
is provided, policy makers exploit the low observability of their actions to
make bad use of political discretion, reinforcing citizens’ perception that
political outcomes are unresponsive to their preferences.
Using cross-country data from the 2004 Citizenship database of the
International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), this article empirically inves-
tigate the existence of a link between government transparency and citizens’
external political efficacy.
To the best of our knowledge, ISSP 2004 is the most recent survey tack-
ling issues related to citizenship and specifically focused on political atti-
tudes. Given that more recent data on external political efficacy are
unavailable, we were forced to use this data set in our empirical analysis.
Nevertheless, in the years from 2004 until now the interest in transparency
has grown even outside academia, and events like the National Security Agency
leaks and Wikileaks releases have stimulated a huge and international public
debate on the consequences of information disclosure. If one believes that this
has substantially changed the relation between transparency and political atti-
tudes, then our results only provide insights on the transparency–political
598
Administration & Society 50(4)
efficacy link before the dramatic increase in government transparency realized
in recent years. In this perspective, our findings may be useful in explaining the
dynamics of such an event-rich decade and call for new data collection and
analyses able to compare results with ours.
Our analysis of the link between government transparency and political
efficacy specifically investigates whether the correlation between these two
variables significantly depends upon individual attributes. The rationale
behind this hypothesis arises from the idea that transparency goes beyond
mere information disclosure and has a demand-side dimension (Forssbaeck
& Oxelheim, 2014). People’s access and responses to information may be
different according to their cognitive capacities (Khagram et al., 2013), for
example, availability of information means nothing for those who do not
have the skills needed to find, understand, and elaborate it. It follows that
when government transparency is at work, policy makers may be primarily
prone to respond to those citizens who have the opportunity to scrutinize their
actions, namely, those who have the skills to exploit the availability of infor-
mation. According to this reasoning, transparency is supposed to be mainly
positively correlated with these citizens’ external political efficacy.
While citizens’ skills that are needed to take advantage of government
information are not clearly measurable, individuals’ level of formal education
is supposed to be highly correlated with this (Bowler & Donovan, 2002).
Following such an approach, it may be hypothesized that the more citizens
are educated, the higher their ability will be to exploit information availabil-
ity and, consequently, the stronger their feeling will be that government has
to be responsive to them.
Indeed, empirical evidence provided in this article confirms that the impact
of government transparency on people’s external political efficacy is stronger
for more educated citizens. This result robustly supports the political initiatives
favoring citizens’ capacity to interact with government procedures and deci-
sions by adopting a user-centered approach to circumvent...
To continue reading
Request your trial