Assessing Open Government Performance through Three Public Administration Perspectives: Efficiency, Democratic Responsiveness, and Legal-rational Process

Abstract

Open government is a growing feature of public administration in governments across the globe. Open government has long been considered vital to democratic society but, with the arrival of digital government, openness has become touted by governments that use information and communication technologies (ICT) without making the necessary legal and institutional reforms to support accountability and transparency. The intersection of openness and ICT challenges our approach to digital government in public administration practice and theory, and it calls for better theoretical frameworks to make sense of open government performance. In this paper, I propose a threefold framework of efficiency, democratic responsiveness, and legal-rational process. The framework is conceptually analyzed through four types of open government: budget transparency, citizen engagement, open data, and freedom of information. The analysis results in the creation of a set of measurement items that help to clarify important aspects of open government performance, and which can be used to generate indicators for evaluating open government initiatives.