Over the last twenty years, transparency has gained currency as a tool of governance across liberal democracies. This trend is particularly evident in the field of anti-corruption policies where more transparency has become a common response to problems of public integrity, widely promoted by leading international NGOs, such as Transparency International, and international organizations, such as the OECD and the United Nations. The central role assigned to information disclosure in the principles and policies embedded in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, signed by 170 countries in 2003, is a powerful illustration of the faith placed in transparency in this area of public administration across the world.
However, public disclosure of information about government and public officials, in itself, can offer limited value to citizens. In order to be effective as a tool against corruption, mismanagement and poor governance, transparency depends on associated conditions of high publicity and effective public accountability. For example, passive transparency requirements that do little to widely disseminate information in an intelligible and accessible format are unlikely to be effective. Similarly, accessible information will not be empowering in the absence of effective accountability mechanisms that can be used by citizens. Consequently, the design of transparency regimes with respect to these conditions of publicity and accountability will necessarily have an effect on the potential effectiveness of transparency, and ineffective institutional designs threaten to constitute a serious “blind spot” of the transparency movement.
Yet, this crucial interplay between publicity and public accountability has not been sufficiently considered, either by academics or by governments adopting integrity policies predicated on the effectiveness of transparency as a tool of good government. In the paper, we will examine how different institutional conditions can promote (low and high) publicity and (horizontal and vertical) accountability and propose a typology of transparency regimes based on combinations of these conditions. We will then explore the analytical purchase of this theoretical contribution by applying the typology to an analysis of four policy areas where Canadian government has attempted to use transparency to promote integrity in public administration: the regulation of conflicts of interests, the protection of whistleblowers, the regulation of lobbying and the access-to-information system. We will show that, despite their common reliance on transparency, these four areas actually rely on different combinations of publicity and accountability features, in some cases resulting in widespread public criticism of their performance.
We hope that, in doing so, the paper will make a theoretical contribution to the field of transparency, providing a heuristic framework that could be used for analyzing other systems, as well as an empirical contribution by moving forward our understanding of integrity policies and their use of transparency.
