Perceptions of City Managers About Open Government Policies

Abstract

At this point, the role of the concept Open Government (OG) has been key promoting transparency, participation and collaboration in public administration worldwide. This article presents research about the open government (OG) phenomena in Spanish municipalities over 50,000 inhabitants (146 municipalities), using a questionnaire. Particularly, the research objective of this article is looking at the perceptions of city managers responsible for OG policies in order to understand more about this emergent public policy in the local layer of government. The results are consistent with a notion of OG associated to terms like transparency or access to information, and less to collaboration, co-production, of technologies or electronic government. In addition, the results confirm the intention of city managers to promote transparency or access to information with OG policies, while other possible outcomes (collaboration, managerial improvements or reduction of management costs) are less popular. Finally, the implementation of OG policies remains in its initial stages, whereas they are much expanded in strategic plans or units/departments at the local level of government in Spain.