Lost in Transparency? government transparency, citizens' education ...

Lost in Transparency? government transparency, citizens’ education and external political efficacy

Lorenzo Cicatiello University of Naples L’Orientale, Department of Human and Social Sciences [email protected]

Elina De Simone Department of Business and Economic Studies, Parthenope University of Naples [email protected]

Giuseppe Lucio Gaeta University of Naples L’Orientale, Department of Human and Social Sciences [email protected]

Abstract: Empirical studies on the relationship between government transparency and citizens’ political attitudes have mostly focused on the effect of the openness of information on legitimacy and trust in government, while the influence of transparency on citizens’ political efficacy has received little attention among scholars. Using cross-country data from the Citizenship database of the 2004 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and relying on multilevel mixed-effects modeling, this paper investigates the link between government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy. Results indicate that transparency enhances the perception of institutions’ responsiveness to citizens’ actions (which is their external political efficacy), but also highlight that this effect is moderated by citizens’ level of education. In particular, while for better educated people the magnitude of government transparency’s effect on citizens’ external efficacy is substantial, the same effect is negligible for less educated citizens who appear to be “lost in transparency”. Jel codes: D70, D80, H83 Keywords: Government transparency, citizens’ political efficacy, accountability, education

1. Introduction Over recent years scholars have devoted increasing attention to the analysis of government transparency (Hood, 2001; Stiglitz, 2002; Heald, 2006; Roberts, 2006; Khagram et al., 2013). Mostly meant as “data dissemination and availability of information concerning government decision” (Hollyer et al., 2011), transparency has become a milestone of contemporary public governance because it has been theorized to contribute to a range of positive outcomes. According to the existing literature, government transparency reduces principal-agent problems arising from asymmetric information by easing citizens’ observability of government actions and performances (Stiglitz, 2002). This effect creates an incentive for the agent (government) to be less corrupt, more efficient and responsive to citizens’ needs and actions (Hood and Heald, 2006; Fung et al., 2007).This, in turn, increases principals’ (citizens’) sense of control and therefore positively influences their political attitudes such as trust, satisfaction with government, confidence in politics and political efficacy. 1

A number of papers have empirically investigated this linkage between government transparency and citizens’ trust in and satisfaction with government (Welch et al., 2005; Tolbert and Mossberger, 2006; Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2013; Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer, 2014; Bauhr and Grimes, 2014; de Fine Licht, 2014a; de Fine Licht, 2014b) but the impact of government transparency on citizens’ political efficacy has been explicitly addressed only recently (Hawkins et al., 2013). This paper aims to contribute to the analysis of this topic. The seminal contribution by Campbell et al. (1954) defines citizens’ political efficacy as the "feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process” (p. 187). While it has been initially analyzed as a single construct (Morrell, 2003), the concept of political efficacy has been later split by scholars (Craig and Maggiotto, 1982; Niemi et al., 1991; Riedel and Sullivan, 2001) into two different concepts referring to citizens’ perception about:  

their own potential impact on the political process resulting from their own skills and confidence, which is their internal political efficacy (Riedel and Sullivan, 2001); political institutions’ responsiveness to their actions in the political process, which is their external political efficacy (Abramson and Aldrich, 1982).

As it emerges from these definitions, internal political efficacy is mostly related to people’s feelings that they have the individual capacity to participate in public decision-making and affect it (Almond and Verba, 1963) while external political efficacy is a system-focused concept because mostly refers to individuals’ perception of systemic features (Converse, 1972; Abramson and Aldrich, 1982). Being based on feelings about the responsiveness of systems, citizens’ external political efficacy is presumably correlated with institutional features such as government transparency (Coglianese et al., 2008). In countries where accurate and up-to-date information about government activities is provided, policymakers’ behavior is open to wide public scrutiny and assessment. Government accountability is therefore enhanced and, as a consequence, citizens develop strong feelings that decision makers are responsive to them. Conversely, in countries where low information about government behavior is provided, policymakers exploit the low observability of their actions in order to make bad use of political discretion; this reinforces citizens’ perception that political outcomes are unresponsive to them. Using cross-country data from the Citizenship database of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP - 2004), this paper empirically investigate the existence of this link between government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy . Furthermore, this work investigates whether the correlation between government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy significantly depends upon individual attributes. The rationale behind this hypothesis arises from the idea that transparency goes beyond mere information disclosure and has a demand-side dimension(Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, 2014). Peoples’ access and responses to information may be different according to their cognitive capacities (Khagram et al., 2013), e.g. availability of information means nothing for those who do not have the skills needed to find, understand and elaborate it. It follows that when government transparency is at work, policy makers may be primarily prone to respond to those citizens who have the opportunity to scrutinize their job, namely those who have the skills to exploit the availability of information. According to this reasoning,

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transparency is supposed to be mainly positively correlated with these citizens’ external political efficacy. While citizens’ skills that are needed to take advantage of government information are not observable in the ISSP dataset, individuals’ level of formal education is supposed to be highly correlated with them (Bowler and Donovan, 2002). Following this approach, it may be hypothesized that the more citizens are educated the higher is their ability to exploit information availability and, consequently, the stronger is their feeling that government has to be responsive to them. Indeed, our empirical evidence confirms that the impact of government transparency on peoples’ external political efficacy is stronger for more educated citizens. This result robustly supports the political initiatives favoring citizens’ capacity to interact with government procedures and decisions by adopting a user-centered approach to circumvent the problem of unequal access to information due to intellectual barriers. In the absence of massive campaigns aimed at covering this achievement gap, disparities in the citizens’ capacity to exploit information will leave less educated individuals “lost in transparency”. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a comprehensive discussion of the hypothesis about the existing link between government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy, and about the mediating role of individual education. Section 3 presents data and methodology adopted in the empirical analysis. Results are presented in section 4 while section 5 is devoted to discussion and conclusions. 2. Government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy A wide literature shows that political activities are affected by agency problems; the presence of information asymmetry “may give rise to a disparity between, say, the actions of those governing and those they are supposed to serve” (Stiglitz, 2002, p. 32) and “allows government officials the discretion to pursue policies that are more in their interests than in the interest of citizenry” (Stiglitz, 2002, p. 28). In this scenario, citizens feel that government is unresponsive to their actions and therefore they lack the incentives to act in line with their civic duties, which is a prerequisite for democratic systems (King, 2007; Dalton, 2013). Government transparency is invoked as a solution “to almost any failure of the political system” (Levy, 2007, p. 306). In the existing literature, it is mostly defined as “the availability of, and feasibility for actors both internal and external to state operations to access and disseminate information relevant to evaluating institutions” (Bauhr and Grimes, 2012, p.5, see also Heald, 2006 and 2014; Bannister and Connolly, 2011; Meijer, 2013). This disclosure of information about government activities definitely contributes to democratic governance as in democracies citizens “have a basic right to know, to speak out, and to be informed about what the government is doing and why and to debate it” (Stiglitz, 2002, p. 29). Indeed, government transparency mitigates public sector agency problems because it improves observability of political effort making it distinguishable from opportunistic behaviour or stochastic factors (Alt and Lassen, 2006,) and creates what Powell and Whitten (1993) define as “clarity of responsibility”. In other words, government transparency eases citizens’ scrutiny of policy makers (Kopits and Craig, 1998) and therefore endows them with a powerful mechanism to control political choices which should promote government accountability and responsiveness to their actions (Justice and Dülger, 2009). This, in turn, has a positive impact on citizens’ attitudes toward government (Nam, 3

2012), as has been demonstrated by a number of scholars who have shown that government transparency is positively correlated with people’s trust and satisfaction towards the government, legitimacy and acceptance of public decision-making (Welch et al., 2005; Tolbert and Mossberger, 2006; Kim and Lee, 2012; Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012; Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2013; Bauhr and Grimes, 2014; Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer, 2014; de Fine Licht, 2014a; de Fine Licht, 2014b). Of course, the positive impact of government transparency on policy makers’ accountability is meant to be reflected in citizens’ feelings about policy makers’ receptiveness and responsiveness to their actions which are commonly defined as external political efficacy (Abramson and Aldrich, 1982). Indeed, according to Lee and Johnston (2013), “transparency provides citizens with a real influence on public policies. Citizens not only participate in solution-building, having their preferences and perspectives integrated into public decisions, but also track how government has dealt with their suggestions through real policy. Such public scrutiny enables the public to feel its ability to influence a policy decision”. In line with this reasoning, those governments that provide a better disclosure of information about their policy intentions and activities are more responsive to citizens’ actions and this, in turn, makes people feel a higher external political efficacy. As such, this reasoning translates into the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1: government transparency enhances citizens’ external political efficacy. To the best of our knowledge, there has been little empirical research focused on this topic; previous research has analysed how political efficacy is affected by media use (Newhagen, 1994) internet accessibility and by the use of e-government (Parent et al., 2005; Kenski and Stroud , 2006; Sharoni, 2008; Coleman et al.,2008). Nevertheless, an investigation specifically focused on hypothesis 1 is particularly relevant because scholars have shown that external efficacy shapes voting behaviour and significantly influences political participation (Stephen and Maggiotto, 1981; Bowler and Donovan, 2002; Karp and Banducci, 2008). More specifically, “external political efficacy might be a more important predictor of engagement than internal efficacy. This may be because external political efficacy shapes political sentiments and, consequently, political participation, while internal political efficacy is more likely to affect self-esteem and self-efficacy, which might not translate into political engagement” (Corrigal-Brown and Wilkes, 2014, p. 411). In order to deepen understanding of the impact of transparency on individual political efficacy it is worth noting that “for transparency to be effective, there must be receptors capable of processing, digesting, and using the information” (Heald, 2006, p.35). This means that together with physical access, users must be able to share the available information (i.e. societal access) and understand the content of government information (i.e. intellectual access) to obtain the complete transparency which succeeds at societal level (Jaeger and Bertot, 2010). To put it more concisely, in order to fully exploit the benefits arising from government transparency citizens need the skills to realize that information about government activities is available and to understand/ interpret this information (Carlitz, 2010). Those who have these skills can effectively scrutinize government activities and hold it accountable and therefore it seems plausible that policy makers have a strong incentive to respond to them. It follows that the existence of a nexus between government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy should be moderated by citizens’ ability to exploit the available information. On the other hand, it may also happen that if voters are aware of their inability to judge public policies, transparency can generate 4

discomfort and individuals may display a preference for opacity (Salmon and Wolfersperger, 2007).In the latter case, we may imagine that at the lowest level of cognitive capacities, the effect of transparency can be negative or, at least, negligible. Although citizens’ abilities are mostly unobservable, the existing literature highlights that “formal education is expected to give citizens resources and skills that help them negotiate the political world” (Bowler and Donovan, 2002, p. 379). Therefore citizens’ education should shape the effect of transparency on citizens’ external political efficacy. According to this reasoning, the following hypothesis is formulated: Hypothesis 2: Individual level of education moderates the effect of government transparency on citizens’ external political efficacy. More in detail, the positive effect of government transparency on citizens’ political efficacy is higher in the case of more educated people and lower that of less educated ones. The two hypotheses presented in this section will be empirically tested in the following analysis. 3. Data and Methodology For the purpose of examining the hypotheses presented previously, this paper relies on an empirical analysis that deals with individual-level and country-level variables. Micro data come from the 2004 module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP); this is a cross-national collaboration research programme which conducts annual surveys on diverse social science topics since 1985. The survey includes a basic questionnaire recording socio-demographic characteristics of respondents plus a specific topic for each year. The 2004 module focuses on citizenship and has been often used by scholars to assess the impact of a wide range of institutional characteristics on citizens’ political attitudes (de Moor et al., 2013). On the other hand, country-level data come from different sources and were merged consistently with the interview period. Due to missing country data, this paper analyzes data from 27 out of the 38 countries covered in the ISSP original sample which is made up of 35,487 units.1 3.1 Dependent Variable The individual-level dataset includes one variable that is suitable to measure external political efficacy according to the definition provided in section 2. Indeed, the ISSP survey asks to what extent respondents agree or disagree with the following statement: “I don’t think the government cares much what people like me think”. The selected item represents a well consolidated measurement for the external dimension of political efficacy in the related literature (Morrell, 2003). Answers to this question are coded from 1 (“Strongly agree”) to 5 (“Strongly disagree”) where the higher the value the more the external political efficacy reported by the respondent. This variable was labeled EXTERNAL and used as dependent in our empirical elaborations. Country averages vary from 1.81 in Poland to 3.10 in Denmark as reported in table 1. 1

Countries included are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States.

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3.2 Key explanatory variables In order to test the above-mentioned hypotheses, a measure of government transparency has to be included as the principal covariate in the empirical analysis. In following Bauhr and Grimes (2014) this paper employs a country-level index of government transparency (labeled WE_GOV_TRANS) annually provided by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and built by processing the information contained in a cross country international firms’ survey (Executive Opinion Survey, Browne et al., 2008). This index ranges from 1 to 7; the higher the score, the easier it is to obtain information about changes in government policies and regulations in that country. As reported in tab. 1, in our sample the index varies from a minimum of 3, reported for Bulgaria, to a maximum of 6.1 for Denmark. In figure 1 country-level average values of citizens’ external political efficacy are plotted against the corresponding values of the government transparency index. The figure suggests that a positive correlation between these two variables exists; furthermore, Cyprus can be considered an outlier which drives down the degree of the observed correlation expressed by the slope of the fitted line. While this introductory examination provides a preliminary support to hypothesis 1, it only allows this correlation to be observed without controlling for individual and country characteristics. A more accurate investigation requires a regression analysis which includes individual and country variables and deals with the clustering of individuals between countries. In order to test hypothesis 2, a substantial variable in the empirical analysis is the individual level of education. For each of the respondents the ISSP dataset provides this information coded from 0 to 5, with 0 indicating “no formal education” and 5 “university degree completed”. We labeled this variable DEGREE. Tab. 1 reports country means and Tab. 2 reports the overall averages for each level of schooling. The inclusion of this variable in the analysis enables the impact of individual education on external political efficacy to be tested. This is expected to be positive as “higher levels of education are one of the main determinants of higher levels of political efficacy” (Bowler and Donovan, 2002, p. 379). Nevertheless hypothesis 2 states that education moderates the effect of government transparency on perceived external political efficacy and its test implies the inclusion of an interaction term between DEGREE and WE_GOV_TRANS among the covariates. 3.3 Control variables To ensure the reliability of the analysis a wide set of individual controls is included. The literature has emphasized the importance of some individual level variables such as education, gender, age, income, marital status, work status and place of residence as important covariates of citizens’ attitudes toward government (Bowler and Donovan, 2002; Sharoni, 2008; Hawkins et al., 2013; Welch et al., 2005; Tolbert and Mossberger, 2006; Dyck and Lascher, 2009; Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2013; Bauhr and Grimes, 2014). Riedel and Sullivan (2001) and Sharoni (2008) showed that political efficacy is linked to political interest and participation, which are significantly related to government transparency (Meijer, 2013; Khagram et al., 2013). Thus, to rule out the potential correlation between political engagement and political efficacy, the analysis takes into account a number of dummy variables that record whether respondents performed some political actions during the year before the interview: signing a petition, boycotting certain products, taking part in demonstrations, attending political meetings or rallies, contacting a politician, donating money or raising funds, contacting media, joining an internet political forum. 6

Insofar as the country-level controls are concerned, this analysis includes per capita gross domestic product (source: World Bank)since it is correlated to transparency (Bauhr and Grimes, 2014) and is likely to be linked with political attitudes. Furthermore, since features of the political systems influence citizens’ political efficacy (Coleman and Davis, 1976), dummies measuring the executive-legislative relations according to Lijphart (2012) were collected from the Comparative Political Dataset III (Armingeon et al., 2013) and included as covariates in the analysis. Some descriptive statistics of the mentioned variables are available in tab. 1 and 2. 3.4 Empirical strategy On the basis of the revised literature, previous investigations about the impact of transparency on political attitudes mostly relied on analysis of variance/covariance (Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012; Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2013; Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer, 2014; de Fine Lict, 2014a,b), while few works used two-stage models (Welch et al., 2005; Tolbert and Mossberger, 2006) and even less used a multilevel mixed-effects approach (Bauhr and Grimes, 2014). Indeed, the analysis of data from nested levels (individual and country-level) needs to be performed with an adequate statistical methodology, because within-cluster correlation is likely to exist, and has to be looked into. Rabe-Hesket and Skrondal (2012) highlight that “ignoring the clustering generally leads to incorrect estimated standard errors and hence incorrect p-values” (p.123). Multilevel mixed-effects modeling enables between-country heterogeneity to be accounted for while fitting the regression at the individual level. The number of level-2 units included in the present analysis (27 countries) is above the threshold of 10 or 20 required for achieving correct estimates (Rabe-Hesket and Skrondal, 2012). As Aguinis et al. (2013) point out, such a methodological approach makes possible to test the three types of relationship this analysis wants to look into: lower-level direct effects (individual education on individual political efficacy), cross-level direct effects (government transparency on individual political efficacy) and crosslevel interaction effects (moderating effect of individual education on the effect of transparency on individual political efficacy). The analysis will be performed using a step-by-step approach, thus checking for country diversity before including individual and country covariates. Before looking at the results, it is worth noting that the cross-sectional nature of the data employed may leave the analysis vulnerable to causality issues since the nexus between government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy may turn out to be ambiguous because of endogeneity issues. The use of an indicator of government transparency which extracts the aggregate value of systemic availability of information from a different survey than the ISSP, may alleviate this problem/weakness. However, the analysis has to be interpreted as the search for robust ceteris paribus correlations and its results should promote further empirical research based on broad longitudinal data. 4. Results Tab. 3 shows the results for different model specifications. In the “Null” model no covariate is included, so that the constant term (CONS) indicates the overall mean of the dependent variable, while its estimated variance (var(CONS)) indicates how much the random intercepts vary between countries. A synthetic indicator of the within-country composition of our dependent variable is the ICC (Intra-Class Correlation) that amounts to 0.10, meaning that the correlation within countries explains 10% of the variation of external political efficacy. 7

In “Level 1” model only the individual level of education and individual controls are included. The coefficients of control variables are not shown in order to save space but are available upon request. Before analyzing the results, it would help to bear in mind that the inclusion of individual covariates leads to a loss of observations due to missing data. The last and more demanding model presented here includes approximately 70% of the interviews collected in the original ISSP dataset. This is why, as a robustness check, all the analysis presented hereafter were also run with the exclusion of all the covariates that show high rates of non-response and thus approximately 96% of the original ISSP sample was considered; the results, which are available upon request, did not change significantly. Returning to the coefficients obtained in “Level 1” model, they show that citizens’ external political efficacy increases with their individual schooling level; this is not surprising as it is consistent with the evidence provided by previous works on this topic (Bowler and Donovan, 2002; Kensky and Stroud, 2006; Dyck and Lascher, 2009). In “Level 2” model country-level covariates were also included as regressors, together with individual covariates. Again, results for control variables are not reported in order to save space. The results support the preliminary descriptive evidence provided in section 3.2, as they show that government transparency has a positive and highly statistically significant ceteris paribus impact on citizens’ external political efficacy. According to this result, the observability of government actions exerts a positive impact on their perception about political institutions’ responsiveness. In this perspective, transparency increases the accountability of policy makers and therefore bolsters citizens’ sense of control, thus feeding a system-oriented sense of efficacy which is measured by their external political efficacy. These results strongly support hypothesis 1. To test how individual education moderates the effect of government transparency on citizens’ external political efficacy (hypothesis 2), an interaction term between DEGREE and WE_GOV_TRANS is included as independent variable in the “complete” model and a random slope on DEGREE is added. The random slope on individual education is needed as its effect on individual external political efficacy clearly differs by country, as shown in image 2. As Brambor et al. (2005) point out, the interpretation of interaction terms always require a particular attention. Indeed the coefficients of an interaction and their significance cannot be interpreted as unconditional linear effect, but have to be looked into more in detail. This is why rather than showing the results table, which is available upon request, the best option is to plot the conditional effects on a graph containing the values for the interacted variables. Figure 3 shows the average marginal effects of transparency (WE_GOV_TRANS) on external political efficacy at different levels of education attainment (DEGREE). It illustrates how an increase in government transparency affects citizens’ external efficacy depending on their schooling level. Marginal effects are positive and significant starting from DEGREE=2 (“Above lowest qualification”), and become greater in magnitude as education increases. The examination of this figure clearly confirms hypothesis 2 as it shows that individual-level education moderates the effect of government transparency on citizens’ external political efficacy. According to these results, this effect is higher (lower) for more (less) educated citizens. To understand this outcome better, it is useful to visualize the marginal effect of each level of education on political efficacy at the actual levels of governmental transparency observed in our dataset. Figure 4 8

shows the effect of a discrete change of education from the base level on external political efficacy. Therefore, it captures the relationship between individual education and external political efficacy at different levels of government transparency. At the lowest level of observed government transparency the marginal effect of education on external political efficacy is not significant (zero is included in the 95% confidence intervals calculated for all the levels of DEGREE). As transparency increases the marginal effects remain not significant for DEGREE=1 (“Lowest formal qualification) and DEGREE=2 (“Above lowest qualification”), whereas for DEGREE=3 (“Higher secondary completed”) the effects become significant at roughly WE_GOV_TRANS=4.2 and for DEGREE=4 (“Above higher second level”) the threshold of significance is roughly at WE_GOV_TRANS=3.4. Finally, for the highest level of education (“University degree completed”) the effect of government transparency on external political efficacy is significant, with a considerably increasing magnitude as transparency improves. Again, these results clearly support hypothesis 2 presented in the second section of the paper; when government transparency is implemented, the more citizens are educated the higher their chance is to exploit the benefits arising from information disclosure in order to make policy makers accountable. It follows that their perceived external political efficacy is higher. A crucial point here is that while for better educated people the magnitude of the effect of transparency on external political efficacy is increases considerably as transparency improves, for less educated the same effect appears to be constantly equal to zero. Hence, considering that less educated citizens lack awareness and skills, government transparency does not affect their external political efficacy, leaving them “lost in transparency”. 5. Conclusion The connection between government transparency and citizens’ political attitudes, such as trust in government, satisfaction with the political order and confidence in politics, has been empirically investigated by a number of scholars. Surprisingly an analysis specifically focused on whether availability of information on government activities influences citizens’ external political efficacy has been mostly neglected. Nevertheless, citizens’ external political efficacy, which refers to their perception about political institutions’ responsiveness to their actions, is included among political attitudes ( Bowler and Donovan, 2002) and is actually “one of the more thoroughly examined concepts in the study of political socialization […] because it is thought to be central to political participation” (Gimpel et al., 2003, p. 16). With the aim to empirically contribute to the investigation of the effects of government transparency on citizens’ external political efficacy, this paper has presented an empirical analysis based on crosscountry multi-level data. The analysis provided two main contributions that allow for a deeper understanding of the outcomes of government transparency. First, it identifies government transparency as one of the drivers of citizens’ external political efficacy; according to our results, the higher is the availability of information about government activities, the higher is the perceived policy makers’ response to citizens’ actions. This positive effect of transparency on citizens’ external political efficacy confirms that information disclosure is a commitment device that allows policymakers to be held accountable for their actions (Kenski and Stroud, 2006; Debrun and Kumar, 2007). In this perspective, transparency is a crucial feature of democracies.

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Second, it shows that citizens’ knowledge and skills (proxied by their level of education) enhance the working of transparency as a powerful tool to strengthen their political efficacy. Indeed, this result clearly emphasizes the importance of the demand-side dimension of transparency (Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, 2014) by showing that only people who are endowed with resources and skills that ease their access to information and its understanding (namely more educated people) can fully benefit from government transparency in order to effectively monitor policy makers and hold them accountable; therefore, the higher people’s education is the higher is the positive effect that government transparency produces on their external political efficacy. Conversely, information disclosure about government activities is less effective for citizens who show lower skills (lower education), because they do not have adequate tools to benefit from it and, feeling a sense of discomfort, may prefer opacity to transparency This is not surprising since when citizens “have no means to judge, they will tend to be inattentive to the means employed by the government and also to the question of whether these means are the most appropriate to produce the outcomes they are concerned with” (Salmon and Wolfelsperger 2007, 15). Overall, this result confirms that only “citizens with high levels of political sophistication are more knowledgeable about the opportunities offered by the political system” and therefore “political sophistication moderates the impact of institutional structure on external political efficacy” (de Moor et al., 2013, p.8). Strong policy implications may be drawn from these results. The first result clearly supports the enhancement of measures aimed at boosting government transparency as a tool to alleviate (the perception of) principal-agent problems between citizens and policy makers. Furthermore, the second result provided by the analysis suggests that increasing government transparency does foster citizens’ external political efficacy among skilled (educated) people, while it is less effective for less skilled (educated) ones. Hence, in order to enhance the sense of influence over public decision-making by the latter, it is necessary to appeal to education policies or to reduce the barriers to information appropriation and interpretation. In this perspective, this paper shares with previous contributions the belief that government information must be available as well as designed to be usable by all (Jaeger and Bertot, 2010) and that governments’ policies to improve public disclosure of information “must result in citizen-centered approaches that are available to and usable by all members of the public...[and] will need to focus on the human dimensions of transparency, not just the technological dimensions” (Jaeger and Bertot, 2010, p.375). To conclude, the results provided by this paper suggest that our understanding of the effects of government transparency may be furthered by exploring two directions of research. First, as several definitions of government transparency exist, further analyses could investigate whether these definitions have the same link with citizens’ external political efficacy that was found here. Second, the literature should deepen the analysis of the interaction between role of individual-level skills (education) and government transparency in shaping citizens’ political attitudes.

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14

Country Australia Austria Belgium Bulgaria Canada Cyprus Czech Rep. Denmark Finland France Germany Hungary Ireland Japan Latvia Netherlands New Zealand Norway Poland Portugal Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Un. Kingd. Un. States

POL. DEGREE SYS. 0 3.15 3 2.30

SEX (1=fem) 0.52 0.54

EXTERNAL

GDP p. c.

WE_GOV_TRANS

2.43 2.19

34011.74 35662.21

5.5 4.1

2.08 1.82 2.45

34706.69 3733.263 31011.91

3.7 3 4.6

0 3 0

2.80 3.03 3.57

0.48 0.62 0.45

3.03 2.14 3.10 2.66 2.47 2.14 2.23 2.29

21380.9 11156.67 47546.6 36162.66 32784.84 33040.05 10084.52 39717.13

3.7 3.1 6.1 5.2 4.1 4.5 3.4 4.2

1 0 0 3 2 0 0 3

2.86 2.54 3.45 2.82 2.95 1.98 2.32 2.81

0.50 0.59 0.52 0.55 0.45 0.51 0.57 0.57

1.98 1.92

36441.5 5950.128

4.4 3.4

0 0

2.96 3.35

0.53 0.53

2.76 2.60 2.74 1.81 2.08 1.97

39122.29 25194.81 56627.66 7963.021 17653.57 11384.53

5.7 5.2 5.1 3.4 3.7 4.6

0 0 0 3 3 3

2.39 3.00 3.32 2.43 1.88 2.64

0.45 0.56 0.51 0.52 0.59 0.58

2.02 2.55

14607.2 24468.75

4.2 3.8

3 0

2.48 2.25

0.54 0.52

2.64 2.89

40261.12 51734.3

5.4 5.7

0 4

2.79 2.58

0.51 0.53

2.46 2.82

37095.38 41928.89

5.1 5

0 1

2.28 3.71

0.56 0.55

FAM. N INCOME 50.8 53327.4 1914 1006 46.1 1954.0 1398 47.1 2404.7 389.1 1121 50.4 50042.9 1211 53.8 1000 41.4 1099.9

AGE

45.1 19519.2 48.2 450842.6 45.3 3652.4 50.2 2705.9 48.0 2228.4 48.2 147181.0 46.6 34474.1 49.4 5733.2 42.4

213.3 2708.2

48.6 49.6 53052.9 45.6 470582.4 45.8 2042.0 49.0 1078.5 48.4 14694.3 45.1 284617.9 46.0 1518.6 47.1 33700.9 49.9

6813.8 25223.6

1322 1186 1354 1419 1332 1035 1065 1343 1000 1823 1370 1404 1277 1602 1072 1054 2481 1295 1078 853

50.0 45.9 157691.5 1472 TOT 35487

Tab. 1: Descriptive statistics by country. Sources: EXTERNAL, DEGREE, SEX, AGE and FAMILY INCOME from ISSP 2004, WE_GOV_TRANS from World Economic Forum, POLITICAL SYSTEM from Comparative Political Dataset III (note: Political System: 0=Parliamentary system; 1=Presidential system; 2=Semi-presidential dominated by president; 3=Semi-presidential dominated by parliament; 4=Hybrid system).

15

Variable

Modalities

Description

DEGREE

No formal qualification Lowest formal qualification Above lowest qualification

dummy = 1 for those who did not complete any formal education dummy = 1 for those who completed lowest formal education dummy = 1 for those who completed an education above the lowest formal level dummy = 1 for those who completed higher secondary education dummy = 1 for those who completed an education above higher secondary level dummy = 1 for those who completed a University degree dummy = 1 for female dummy = 1 for married or living as married dummy = 1 for widowed dummy = 1 for divorced dummy = 1 for separated, but still married dummy = 1 for single and never married dummy = 1 for those living in a big city dummy = 1 for those living in the suburbs of a big city dummy = 1 for those living in a town or small city dummy = 1 for those living in a country village dummy = 1 for those living in a farm or in a home in the country dummy=1 for employed full-time dummy=1 for employed part-time dummy=1 for employed less than part-time dummy=1 for those who are helping a family member dummy=1 for unemployed dummy=1 for students, still at school or in vocational training dummy=1 for retired dummy=1 for housewife/houseman or taking care of home duties dummy=1 for those who are permanently disabled dummy=1 for those who are not in the labour force dummy=1 if signed a petition in the last year dummy=1 if boycotted certain products in the last year dummy=1 if took part in demonstration in the last year dummy=1 if attended a political meeting or rally in the last year dummy=1 if contacted a politician in the last year dummy=1 if donated money or raised funds in the last year dummy=1 if contacted media in the last year dummy=1 if joined an internet political forum in the last year

Higher secondary completed Above higher secondary University degree completed SEX MARITAL STATUS

TYPE OF COMMUNITY

WORK STATUS

POLITICAL ACTIVITIES

Married,living as married Widowed Divorced Separated, but married Single, never married Urban, a big city Suburb, outskirt of a big city Town or small city Country village Farm or home in the country Employed full-time Employed part-time Empl. less than part-time Helping family member Unemployed Student, school, vocat.training Retired Housewife, -man, home duties Permanently disabled Other, not in labour force Sign a petition Boycott certain products Take part in demonstration Attend political meeting or rally Contact a politician Donate money or raise funds Contact media Join an internet political forum

Obs. Mean Std. Dev. Min Max 35206 35206 35206

0.05 0.17 0.22

0.22 0.38 0.42

0 0 0

1 1 1

35206 35206

0.23 0.16

0.42 0.37

0 0

1 1

35206 35454 35296 35296 35296 35296 35296 35245 35245 35245 35245 35245 35122 35122 35122 35122 35122 35122 35122 35122 35122 35122 34357 33443 34500 34401 34426 34410 34370 34003

0.16 0.53 0.60 0.08 0.07 0.02 0.23 0.28 0.15 0.25 0.27 0.05 0.46 0.08 0.02 0.01 0.05 0.06 0.22 0.08 0.02 0.01 0.24 0.19 0.07 0.07 0.09 0.24 0.04 0.03

0.36 0.50 0.49 0.27 0.26 0.14 0.42 0.45 0.36 0.44 0.44 0.21 0.50 0.27 0.12 0.07 0.22 0.23 0.41 0.26 0.15 0.11 0.43 0.40 0.25 0.26 0.28 0.43 0.20 0.16

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Tab.2: Descriptive statistics of individual-level control variables. Source: ISSP 2004. 16

Null EXTERNAL

Level 1 EXTERNAL

WE_GOV_TRANS

Level 2 EXTERNAL 0.14*** (0.04)

DEGREE=1

0.06 (0.04)

0.00 (0.08)

DEGREE=2

0.14*** (0.04)

0.09 (0.08)

DEGREE=3

0.28*** (0.04)

0.22*** (0.08)

DEGREE=4

0.43*** (0.04)

0.36*** (0.08)

DEGREE=5

0.66*** (0.04)

0.58*** (0.08)

CONS

2.38*** (0.07)

2.23*** (0.08)

1.52*** (0.15)

var (CONS)

0.13*** (0.02)

0.10*** (0.01)

0.04*** (0.00)

var (residual)

1.22*** (0.00)

1.15*** (0.01)

1.14*** (0.01)

No No 0.10 -52378.40 34434

Yes No 0.08 -36488.81 24498

Yes Yes 0.04 -36501.31 24498

Individual Controls Country Controls ICC -2LL N

Tab. 3: Regression results. Note: ***=p-value