Does Transparency Improve Governance?

TLDR

Transparency has attracted growing interest as a means to enhance governance, but reforms face collective‑action problems, political resistance, and lengthy implementation chains. The article aims to chart transparency’s evolution from an ideal to a practical governance tool and to introduce a five‑world rubric that explains outcome variation. The authors focus on transparency‑and‑accountability interventions, delineate four varieties of transparency, and construct a five‑world rubric to analyze their effects. T/A interventions show mixed outcomes, succeeding more in contexts with fewer obstacles, and 16 experimental studies largely support the five‑world rubric’s predictions.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the potential of transparency—the provision of information to the public—to improve governance in both developed and developing societies. In this article, we characterize and assess the evolution of transparency from an end in itself to a tool for resolving increasingly practical concerns of governance and government performance. After delineating four distinct varieties of transparency, we focus on the type that has received the most rigorous empirical scrutiny from social scientists—so-called “transparency and accountability” (T/A) interventions intended to improve the quality of public services and governance in developing countries. T/A interventions have yielded mixed results: some are highly successful; others appear to have little impact. We develop a rubric of five ideal-typical “worlds” facing transparency that helps to account for this variation in outcomes. Reform based on transparency can face obstacles of collective action, political resistance, and long implementation chains. T/A interventions are more likely to succeed in contextual “worlds” with fewer of these obstacles. We find that 16 experimental evaluations of T/A interventions are largely consistent with the theoretical predictions of our five-worlds rubric.