Does transparency really matter?
It’s widely believed that transparency will improve the perceived legitimacy of governmental decisionmaking. But is that really the case? In the current issue of Governance, four scholars from the University of Gothenberg — Jenny De Fine Licht, Daniel Naurin, Peter Esaiasson, and Mikael Gilljam — use an innovative experimental design to determine how transparency actually affects legitimacy. “The common notion of a straightforward positive correlation between transparency and legitimacy is rather naïve,” the authors argue. “The effect is highly dependent on context and may indeed be negative as well as positive.” Free access to the article.
Also in the current issue, Yeling Tan examines the unexpected ways in which disclosure of environmental information has produced results in China. Read an interview with Yeling Tan on the Governance blog.
