CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Mackeviciute, Raimonda |
|---|---|
| Title | Do We Really Care Who Opened the Door? The Complex Relationship between Government Transparency and Perceived Legitimacy |
| Summary | This study analyses how perceived legitimacy of government institutions and their decisions is affected by government transparency. Nowadays more and more often government information is disclosed by “outsiders” without the consent of the government institutions (e.g. government information leaks). Nevertheless, this aspect was usually not taken into account in the previous research projects that focused on the relationship between transparency and perceived legitimacy. Aiming to reflect modern reality of government information publicity this study examines how relationship between decision making transparency of the cities’ councils and perceived legitimacy of decisions is affected by the knowledge who revealed the information. Using two survey experiments (n=151 and n=240) the effects of government controlled transparency – situations when government information is voluntary shared by government institutions – are compared to the non-government controlled transparency – situations when government information is disclosed by other actors. Results suggest that contrary to the dominant theoretical expectations, knowledge that information was shared voluntarily by the city council did not have any additional positive effect on citizens’ perceptions. However, non-government controlled acts of transparency affected perceived legitimacy of decisions negatively. Furthermore, knowing that information was leaked made people more likely to think that the decision making procedure was unfair and that the council was less trustworthy. These “thoughts” mediated citizens’ perceptions about the legitimacy of the decision. |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/mackeviciute_raimond.pdf |
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