Factors of Proactive Transparency at the Local Level

Transparency is a key attribute that facilitates public accountability. Provision of information enhances control over government, provides society with important knowledge and increases legitimacy of decision making in politics. In our paper we concentrate on proactive transparency, i.e. provision of data without prior information requests. Previous studies on factors of proactive transparency show rather mixed results and our aim is to shed more light on the topic. In order to do so, we collected data from all 2,926 municipalities in Slovakia and analyze political, economic and social factors that affect proactive transparency of these local bodies. This case selection provides two advantages. First, we study a case that has so far not been analyzed and second, the size of our sample is substantially higher than samples in most of existing studies on proactive transparency. Hence, our findings provide insight to proactive transparency at the local level with broader implications on this field of research.