Public Governance: Factors of Disclosure from the Municipalities of Southern Brazil

Abstract

Governance could be ‘good’ “when a State efficiently provides public goods of necessary quality to its citizens” (ONU, 2007). Public governance is guided by principles like transparency; that means disclosure information of public resources management. Considering this perspective, this study investigates the explanatory factors of the level of disclosure of the most populous municipalities in southern Brazil on their webpages published on the Internet. For such, we constructed a set of 86 indicators representing information, which were used to measure the level of disclosure of 100 among 101 cities with over 50,000 inhabitants in southern Brazil. The econometric analysis of the evidence indicates that the partisan affiliation of mayors, the level of revenues of municipalities and socioeconomic factors explain the level of disclosure of information about municipal management. Thus, the municipalities with high socioeconomic and collection indices have greater willingness to show public information, while municipalities where mayors are affiliated with the political party PSDB statistically have a tendency to show less information indicators examined in this study, compared to the other parties that make up this study sample.