Meijeretal 2012 Open Government Connection Visionand Voice
Meijeretal 2012 Open Government Connection Visionand Voice
Meijeretal 2012 Open Government Connection Visionand Voice
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Deirdre Curtin
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Maarten Hillebrandt
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Abstract
The term open government is often used to describe initiatives of putting government
information on the Internet. This conceptualization is too restricted since open gov-
ernment is not only about openness in informational terms (vision) but also about
openness in interactive terms (voice). On the basis of an analysis of 103 articles, this
article provides insight into the concepts of openness, transparency and participation,
their interactions, and the manner in which they have been discussed in the literature.
This analysis shows the differences and similarities between economic, political science
and legal perspectives on open government and argues that a multidisciplinary approach
needs to be taken. The authors conclude that open government is much too important
to leave it to the ‘techies’: scientists and practitioners with backgrounds in law, eco-
nomics, political science and public administration should also get involved to build
sound connections between vision and voice that facilitate active citizenship.
Corresponding author:
Albert J. Meijer, Associate Professor, School of Governance, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Email: A.J.Meijer@uu.nl
Keywords
open government, participation, transparency
informed properly and can have access to the information they need to participate
but, again, this is the exception rather than the rule. Although openness is widely
propagated by political leaders and in policy documents, the academic discourse is
only beginning to focus on this concept as a whole. Noveck (2009) presents an
interesting – and very techno-optimistic – plea for ‘wiki government’ and connects
access to information to new forms of citizen participation. She argues that tech-
nology will help to overcome limitations to both transparency and participation
and thus will facilitate open government. Similarly, Lathrop and Ruma (2010a)
edited a rich volume with a broad range of (mostly techno-optimistic) papers about
the value of technology for open government, in the sense of both transparency and
participation. These perspectives are strong and provocative but consist of general
assertions not yet founded in empirical study. Our argument builds upon these
salient analyses and grounds them in a thorough review of the literature on trans-
parency and participation to provide a conceptual framework for studying and
developing open government.
The aim of this article is to provide more insight into the concepts of openness,
transparency and participation, and their interactions, and the manner in which
they have been discussed in the literature. We map the variety in positions and,
consequently, we aim to contribute more conceptual precision in the way that the
concepts of openness, transparency and participation are used in future debate.
The precision is needed to develop forms of open government that actually con-
tribute to a stronger democracy and more active citizenship (Barber, 1984). The
central question of our contribution is: what can we learn from the literature on
transparency and participation for the realization of open government? We
acknowledge the importance of studying practices of transparency and participa-
tion from a multidisciplinary perspective and we believe that a more explicit con-
ceptualization of open government is needed to facilitate a multidisciplinary
exploration of it. Combining insights from legal, political, organizational and eco-
nomic sciences will help to deepen our understanding and explain practices of open
government and provide a more solid basis for the further realization of open
government.
This contribution starts off by identifying the constitutive elements of open
government and discussing the relationships between vision and voice. We then
justify the manner in which we have selected a corpus of scientific articles that have
enabled us to draw lessons about open government in general. On the basis of an
analysis of these articles, we will articulate the general lessons we have drawn about
how government works and how open government should be valued.
Openness of government is the extent to which citizens can monitor and influence
government processes through access to government information and access to deci-
sion-making arenas.
Our definition – with monitoring and influencing as key citizen activities – thus
incorporates both elements of transparency, which usually comes in the form of
access to documents, as well as participation, which can take a variety of forms
such as lobbying or consultations. Figure 1 clarifies the relation between transpar-
ency, participation and openness. In the remainder of this article, we will use the
term ‘open government’ as the more encompassing term and ‘participation’ and
‘transparency’ when we refer to specific aspects of openness.3
The two mains component of openness may sometimes overlap. Notices about
public meetings and access to agendas and minutes of meetings can be regarded
Open government
as access to documents but at the same time this form of access strengthens access
to decision-making arenas. The minutes of meetings are important documents but
they are also important for access to decision-making arenas. The relation between
the two components of openness is not straightforward.
We would like to distinguish three types of relationship between the compo-
nents. In the ideal of open government, there is a synergistic relationship between
transparency and participation: transparency ensures that the public gets access to
information about the government and participation provides the public with
access to that same government. Various reinforcing patterns can be distinguished.
For example, for effective participation to be possible, a minimum standard of
transparency is required. Noveck (2009: 121) argues that private individuals can
only seek to influence policy decisions if they know which decisions are being made.
In reverse, transparency may result from the process of participating (Best, 2002:
105; Piotrowksi and Borry, 2010: 163). One could argue that access to information
is a precondition for access to decision-making arenas since one has to know when
and where a meeting will take place and which issues will be discussed to have
access to the meeting. Conversely, access to decision-making arenas may be a
precondition for access to documents since certain documents may be handed
out at a meeting.
Another type of interaction between vision and voice may be in a complementary
relationship. The basic idea here is that active citizenship can sometimes be realized
through transparency and under different conditions through participation.
Welch (2010) suggests that participation may be more important in the initial
stages of the policy cycle whereas transparency may become more relevant in the
1. How can we understand the effects of open government? We will focus our analysis
on two (interrelated) key assumptions about open government: (1) citizens use
the opportunities for accessing information and decision-making arenas and (2)
open government has an effect through these patterns of use.
2. How can we assess the effects of open government? Although various politicians
highlight that transparent government is good, we need to analyze it more
specifically to understand the normative implications of vision and voice. We
will analyze both the desirable effects and the undesirable side-effects.
Both availability
Conceptual perspective Availability and use
(46.4 percent). This seems to indicate that this literature highlights openness as a
feature of government and not as a relational concept.
Communication science teaches us that conceptualizing the users as an amor-
phous mass – ‘the citizens’ – is not helpful. One should acknowledge that there is a
diverse group of individual and organized users with varied capacities and interests.
Vision and voice are never created equally for this group since some may be able to
make better use of opportunities than others. Governments may be tempted to
design open government for a ‘general user’ and miss the effects this has on the
various user groups. Some users may need access to full datasets to be able to carry
out their own analyses; others may be served better by presenting data in an easily
accessible format. Open government needs to be based on a communication strat-
egy tailored to the field of (potential) users.
In terms of the relationship between vision and voice, a government communi-
cation strategy should aim to create either a synergistic relationship – citizens who
want to participate receive the information they need in time – or a complementary
relationship – providing citizens who do not have the opportunities for voice with
the opportunities to monitor processes of participation. An undermining relation-
ship between vision and voice needs to be avoided by timing and shaping trans-
parency and participation. A clear strategy of the anonymity of public reports on
participation may be important to avoid a negative effect of transparency on
participation.
that will only produce effects when these are actually used. For instance, lobby
registers may have no effects on practices unless citizens start raising concerns
about unequal access to lobby circuits. Do we find both avenues in the literature?
The results are presented in Table 3. The effects and perspectives come in various
constellations and do not therefore add up to 100 percent.
Overall, the most frequently cited positive effect is indirect: 83 percent of the
articles mention such an effect in some way. Such indirect effects may be of a
rational-actor type of character, where full information is seen to enhance rational
behavior and facilitates participation. Direct effects are also mentioned in a major-
ity of the articles (59 percent) but not as frequently as the indirect effects. More
publications stipulate that openness has an effect through the activation of
stakeholders.
These findings highlight that the optimization of open government should not be
carried out on the basis of a simple opportunities-use-effects model. Governments
should acknowledge that direct effects may take place. Corruption may be reduced
simply by the fact that officials have to put information about their contacts and
financial benefits on the Internet. Even if nobody accesses this public information,
the public nature of it may still thwart corruption. This means that governments
can pursue different objectives with open government: it can be optimized in terms
of its use by citizens and stakeholders or in terms of its effects on government.
These two may but do not have to be related.
The direct and indirect effects of open government complicate the analysis of
synergistic, complementary and undermining relationships between transparency
and participation. Access to information may facilitate participation but at the
same time access to information may lead to risk-averse behavior within govern-
ment. Conversely, the mere fact that citizens are allowed to participate may in fact
directly lead to more transparency. We should understand the effects of open
government as resulting from synergistic, complementary and undermining rela-
tionships resulting from direct and indirect avenues. The effects need to be studied
from various angles with the overall aims of establishing the effects of various open
government arrangements. This, of course, raises the question of which positive
effects are to be attained. This question is addressed in the next section.
(Crombez, 2003; Florini, 1998; Garcia Lorenzo, 2003). One example of optimiza-
tion through openness is made with reference to decision-making processes: as
actors come and go, the need for open and retraceable records is pivotal for
such processes in the long run (Drew and Nyerges, 2004: 34). Hale furthermore
observes that organizations that withhold important information are increasingly
boycotted or campaigned against (2008: 77).
In a political argument, openness serves as a precondition for political participa-
tion by citizens and stakeholders. Quoting a 1962 Harvard Law Review article,
Piotrowski and Borry (2010) highlight that open meetings provide public knowl-
edge that is essential to a democratic process and indicate that government officials
will be more responsive to the public when there is an opportunity for public
participation at a meeting. They also stress that the public may be more under-
standing and willing to accept undesirable policy outcomes when they have a better
understanding of complex and difficult decisions. Furthermore, political participa-
tion can improve the quality of decision-making when factual misconceptions are
corrected by members of the public who may know more about a specific local
issue.
In a legal argument, openness tends to be presented as a precondition for admin-
istrative legality or the rule of law. Without access to information (access to the file
or even the computer ‘code’), it will be very difficult to enable the citizens to control
the legality of the administration and its actions (Lessig, 1999; O’Neill, 1998). In
addition, openness of the legislative procedures and legal rights of access to doc-
uments may be viewed in their broader democratic context (e.g. Curtin and
Meijers, 1995). The legal realm of participation was long restricted to the scope
of the right to be heard covering only a very limited segment of administrative
action: individual decision-making, i.e. procedures that are liable to culminate in a
measure adversely affecting the person to whom it is addressed. The right to be
heard is a requirement of the rule of law in judicial procedures and owes little to the
democratic rationale of engaging the citizens in the activity of the administration
and of bringing them closer to the exercise of power (Mendes, 2011). Gradually in
many legal systems participation has been widened to include general administra-
tive rulemaking but only where there is an explicit legislative framework, for exam-
ple in the field of the environment (Lee, 2005) or of land planning. The legal
literature reflects this incremental approach to participation in administrative
rule making and there are some discussions on the need to codify.
In addition, two broad arguments are made in the literature that cut across the
various disciplines:
Openness as an incentive for integrity. Some social and legal scientists indicate that
openness is needed to curtail corruption (Bertot et al., 2010). Piotrowski and Borry
(2010) stress that openness will deter misappropriations and conflicts of interest
when the public can observe how public money is spent. In the literature on
whistleblowing, a similar viewpoint is expressed: information is a basis of power,
and power abuses can in turn be counterbalanced through the use of information
(Skivenes and Trygstad, 2010: 1079). Jubb moreover argues that disclosure of
sensitive information is a ‘very direct, unambiguous form of dissent’ based on
the ethical values of the whistleblowers. The whistleblowers seek to bring informa-
tion out into the open, with the underlying idea of altering the course of perceived
injustice (Jubb, 1999: 79). In general, a tendency exists in organizational sciences to
view closedness as an example of ‘hierarchic, introverted and risk-averse’ behavior
(Pasquier and Villeneuve, 2007: 157), while openness on the other hand is believed
to go hand in hand with ‘a high degree of integrity, transparency and responsibility’
(Reid, in Pasquier and Villeneuve, 2007: 159; see also Roberts, 2004: 77; Stiglitz,
1999: 10).
Openness as a precondition for trust. Many papers suggest a direct connection between
openness and trust. Wall, for example, argues that government proceedings should
be ‘publicly accessible and open to public criticism’, since ‘[p]olitical decisions made
behind closed doors or shrouded in mystery are destructive of public trust’ (1996:
502).
This overview shows that the design of open government should not only
acknowledge a variety in effects but also a variety in desirables. The argument
that transparency is a goal in itself may be too simple but, conversely, the argument
that there are direct causal relationships with effectiveness and legitimacy may also
limit our understanding of open government. We propose that open government
needs to be assessed on the basis of a multicriteria model encompassing both means
and ends values. This multicriteria model should not be used to assess the effects of
vision and voice separately but in conjunction with one another. The design of
open government should be directed towards this variety of desirables.
between the two bodies of literature: negative side-effects play a more important
role in the literature on transparency than in the literature on participation.
Participation is more often discussed in terms of whether desired effects are
attained or not, but less frequently negative side-effects are mentioned. If both
aspects are considered, there is also little attention to negative effects.
On the basis of a qualitative analysis of the corpus, we identified some patterns
of alleged negative effects of openness, transparency and participation. These pat-
terns can, again, be traced back to the three foundational disciplines of the field.
According to an economic argument, full information may hamper rational
behavior. Some authors highlight that policy makers need a certain intimacy for
the process of deliberating for policy making. Openness may make them risk
adverse. This direct negative side-effect is often represented through principal–
agent games. Prat (2005), for example, points out that all countries with open
government legislation also have inbuilt requisites of closedness. The reason that
is usually cited for this is that ‘some form of short-term secrecy, while the decision
process is still ongoing’ is desirable (2005: 869; also De Fine Licht and Naurin,
2010: 10; Dror, 1999: 63).
In a political argument, public participation may hamper public policy. In the
literature corpus, indirect perverse effects of openness are also cited. They are
indirect in the sense that they originate within the public but affect the proper
functioning of government. Stiglitz (1999: 18) highlights that when international
organizations such as the World Bank would publicize all shortcomings in a finan-
cial restructuring project, these shortcomings could be exploited by third parties,
while providing the aided country with a strong disincentive to seek assistance.
National security is another oft-cited field that could allegedly suffer from excessive
openness as the national interest could be endangered.
Following a legal argument, full transparency can endanger the legal position of
citizens or companies. Public access to documents can be limited when these doc-
uments explicitly refer to personal details or provide sensitive information about
companies or organizations. This is because it is recognized that openness may
have negative effects on the right of individuals and organizations to privacy and
protection of their vital commercial interests. A similar argument is presented that
governments may have a right to privacy in the performance of public tasks, espe-
cially in the early ‘staging process’ of public policy (Murray, 2004).
In addition, some papers challenge the assertion that openness would lead to
more trust in government. Fung and Weil (2010: 107) argue that transparency ‘may
well produce conservative or even reactionary effects of delegimitizing government
activity quite broadly as public disclosure feeds more and more stories of govern-
ment waste, corruption, and failure’.
These arguments can be regarded as warnings against too much vision and
voice. The general opinion seems to be that governments have to find the right
balance (but there may be huge differences when it comes to the question of
what the right balance is). Negative side-effects are important and one should
not have a naı̈ve image of open government. At the same time, the risk of
negative side-effects should not stop governments from developing open gov-
ernment. How can this dilemma be dealt with? Some negative effects can be
identified beforehand but others will only show up in the practices of open
government. We would like to argue for a learning approach: governments
should monitor the effects of open government carefully to identify negative
side-effects. These monitoring reports can form the input for public and polit-
ical debates about open government.
These lessons form important building blocks for an agenda for empirical
research into open government. This research will first need to be descriptive in
the sense that empirical research can show to what extent we find synergistic,
complementary and undermining relationships between transparency and par-
ticipation and whether opportunities offered by open government are actually
used by a diverse population. Second, this research needs to be evaluative by
assessing the direct and indirect effects of open government in terms of desir-
ables and perverse effects. Third, the research needs to be prescriptive in nature
by developing learning processes for government which they can apply to
develop forms of open government that maximize positive effects and minimize
negative effects.
The integration of vision and voice is both challenging and promising.
A diversified approach to the design and study of open government will be
more fruitful than simply understanding it as the provision of public informa-
tion. Open government is much too important to leave it to the ‘techies’:
scientists and practitioners with a background in law, economics, political
science and public administration should get involved and use their disciplinary
knowledge to build sound connections between vision and voice that facilitate
active citizenship.
Notes
1. Technology may facilitate open government but it also creates new issues. Lessig (1999)
eloquently discusses the question whether government code should be open to enable
public scrutiny. Lessig focuses our attention on the transparency of the machinery of
government.
2. Open government also refers to the idea of facilitating new initiatives in society by pro-
viding open data to society. This could lead to new collaborations between societal actors
and between government and society (Lathrop and Ruma, 2010a). Government could
even be conceptualized as a ‘platform’ instead of an actor (O’Reilly, 2010). This line of
thinking is important but not directly connected to theories about public control and
democracy. We acknowledge the importance of this meaning of open government but
focus our argument on the relation between open government and citizen influence on
government.
3. To enhance our understanding of what open government is, one might also ask what
open government is not. It seems obvious that the opposite of openness is secrecy.
Government decision-making that is not open is carried out behind closed doors. Julia
Black (1997: 476) states: ‘[Transparency] is contrasted with opaque policy measures,
where it is hard to discover who takes the decisions, what they are, and who gains and
who loses.’ A more sophisticated analysis, however, shows that government behind closed
doors is not necessarily secret to everybody: a selective group of actors takes part in the
decision-making process. This indicates that openness and secrecy are at different
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