The interplay between transparency in local electoral manifestos and transparency of municipal webpages (in the Czech Republic)

Local electoral manifestos often contain section about transparency. However, there is an open question whether such rhetorical commitment anyhow affects the real situation regarding transparency. In this paper we are aiming to answer the question using manifestos related to 2022 local elections and data coming from manual coding of official websites of Czech municipalities conducted in December 2023. Data covers almost 1000 manifesto from 150 municipalities with more than 1500 inhabitants and respective number of coded webpages. Manifestos are coded with combination of automatic and manual coding and obtained data are used to asses local council/board ("government") commitment to improvement of transparency. We hypothesize that more elaborated imagination about transparency increases the richness of information on webpages, whereas only vague pledges do not make difference to situation where parties do not provide any pledges about transparency at all.