Abstract
This study uses a qualitative approach to examine what political and technical leaders of municipalities understand transparency and public information to mean, and what role they believe the different subjects involved (government, opposition, and the public) should have. The websites of 605 Spanish councils with more than 100,000 inhabitants were analysed and three focus groups were held with political and technical leaders from a selection of sample councils. The results show that the technical and political leaders of the councils do not have a clear awareness of their function of management accountability or of the need to apply journalistic criteria to the information they publish, defending with nuances the use of propaganda criteria to focus on the actions of the local government, its information, the lack of space dedicated to public debate and the opposition’s actions. In relation to accountability and citizen participation, they have a negative view of citizens, who they describe as being disengaged. However, they emphasize that internally it is essential to continue improving in terms of the culture of transparency and the public information they provide citizens.
Highlights
The results show that the degree of transparency of these websites is not very high and that city councils generally act by exclusively communicating their government action, offer few tools for citizen participation and make a unidirectional use of their social networks
For some of the participants their starting point is that they work to inform about the government and not about the council in general: “When we work on municipal government information, we obviously provide information and an assessment of the institutional figure
Municipal councils must report transparently through their websites, because knowing how public money is managed is a right of citizens, something which acts favourably in the prevention of corruption
Summary
In relation to accountability and citizen participation, they have a negative view of citizens, who they describe as being disengaged. They emphasize that internally it is essential to continue improving in terms of the culture of transparency and the public information they provide citizens. The dissemination of information is an essential requirement for the development of democracy, since only citizens with political knowledge can evaluate the management of leaders in power and make electoral decisions in a reasoned and rational manner [1]. To fulfil that role, that information must include all voices and compare diverse sources so that people can form their opinion by contrasting multiple points of view [2]
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