Factors of Non-Compliance with Central Transparency Policies at the Local Level

Research in the field of information provision points to a difference between the adoption of transparency policies and their implementation. Given that the provision of information is often a discretionary process, the decision-making of institutions and their staff may substantially shape the impact of pro-transparency norms. However, less is known about the behaviour of institutions in the absence of any discretion, i.e., when central policies select some aspects of proactive transparency as mandatory. Previous works indicate that local institutions fare worse than national actors in implementing central policies. This paper thus studies how local governments respond to a national policy dictating that they provide specific information and what factors lead to their (non-)compliance. Our study focuses on the case of the 2022 joint local and regional election in Slovakia, in which the municipalities were, for the first time, required to provide full details about the elections online. To cover the behaviour of local governments, we searched the websites of all 2,926 Slovak municipalities two weeks before election day, when all the necessary information should have already been available. Using multilevel modelling, we analysed the most significant supply-side and demand-side variables influencing the information disclosure identified in previous research. We find that the size of the municipality, unemployment, and belonging to the least developed counties in the country are the main factors associated with electoral information non-disclosure. On the other hand, non-compliance with central transparency policies is not linked to the characteristics of mayors or the level of electoral competition. Our findings thus contribute to the understanding of compliance with transparency policies at the local level and highlight that economic characteristics are the most important factors when it comes to the provision of mandatory information.