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Does Transparency Improve Governance?

In this study, Archon Fung and Stephen Kosack assess the current state of transparency initiatives across the globe. Honing in on interventions with a focus on “transparency for accountability”—which show mixed results—they develop a framework of five “worlds” that helps account for the variation in outcomes.

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With the existing research literature yielding mixed results on the effectiveness of transparency interventions, Archon Fung, Director of Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and
Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and Stephen Kosack of the University of Washington offer a review of the state of transparency initiatives across the globe.

Fung and Kosack center their focus on the area of “transparency for accountability,” which aims to offers a “tool for dealing with increasingly practical and specific concerns of government performance.” In an analysis of 16 studies, the authors find that the success of transparency programs is greatly influenced by social context, with interventions more likely to achieve their goals when “information is clearly understandable and salient to citizens” and recommend “a clear course of action.”

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