Old and New: Government Transparency

• Author: Brian J. Cook
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095399718761057
• Subject Matter: Editorial

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399718761057

Administration & Society

2018, Vol. 50(4) 475

© The Author(s) 2018

DOI: 10.1177/0095399718761057

journals.sagepub.com/home/aas

Editorial

Old and New: Government

Transparency

Increasing the transparency of the functions and processes of government is

now a mainstay of both the public policy agenda and administrative practices

in liberal democracies. The April 2018 issue features five articles touching on

this subject. The first two offer conceptual frameworks for understanding the

use of freedom of information laws and assessing political and administrative

transparency, respectively, while the remaining three articles examine the

factors influencing levels of government transparency or the variable effects

of transparency in three different contexts.

Apart from a passing mention of transparency in some of the earliest arti-

cles published, transparency as a research object did not appear in

Administration & Society until March 2001. Christopher Hood and Henry

Rothstein (2001) examined the “organizational responses to external pressure

for change” toward more transparency in risk regulation across six policy

domains. Their primary aim was to further develop theory about institutional

responses to “environmental disturbance,” and they chose to focus on such

disturbance in the particular form of “increased pressures for openness.”

Because the pressure for openness that the authors examine across the six

cases was in important respects the result of failures in managing risk, they

find considerable evidence of what they call “blame-prevention engineering”

in the six cases. In other words, they found evidence of attempts to deflect

rather than embrace demands for transparency. One policy-oriented conclu-

sion they offered was that risk regulation regimes seeking to respond adeptly

to pressures for transparency might find it advantageous to follow the “insti-

tutional-design equivalent of the well-known precautionary principle”

(p. 43), that is, to operate more openly to begin with.

Research on government transparency has appeared with increasing fre-

quency in the pages of A&S since 2001. As the articles in the current issue

attest, scholars are gaining greater traction in understanding the forms and

scope of government transparency, what explains variations in transparency

behavior across governments and policy regimes, and what effects transpar-

ency practices have on democratic governance.

Brian J. Cook

Virginia Tech

761057AASXXX10.1177/0095399718761057Administration & Society

editorial2018