Understanding the Perspectives of Open Government

Abstract

Open Government (OG) is a term increasingly used in public administrations. The public managers seem to be interested in modernizing their models of public management and they find in the idea of OG strategies to respond to citizen demands. However, there seems to be a dispersion of what public managers understand as OG. This work is a comparative analysis of the perspectives that exists in the local governments of two countries: Mexico and Spain. An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) is carried out to define the perspectives assumed by public managers in both countries and compare them. In order to achieve this purpose, we established the following research question: What perspectives about open government do local public managers have in Spain and Mexico? The findings indicate that while in Spain public managers configure three clear perspectives about OG, meanwhile in Mexico only two perspectives are identified.