Social Capital, E-Government, and Fiscal Transparency in the States

Abstract

Transparency is one requisite of democratic governance. Many American states have implemented online checkbooks and similar forms of fiscal e-transparency, but not universally or with uniformly high quality. This article seeks to explain why. Correlation and regression results support hypotheses that higher-quality implementation responds to lower state levels of social capital, more traditionalistic political cultures, greater perceptions of official corruption, and larger populations.