Factors and their relationships in measuring the progress of open government
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-04-2019-0083 |
| Pages | 17-33 |
| Published date | 17 October 2019 |
| Date | 17 October 2019 |
| Author | Eun G. Park,Wankeun Oh |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Factors and their relationships
in measuring the progress
of open government
Eun G. Park
School of Information Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and
Wankeun Oh
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, The Republic of Korea
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to examine the main factors influencing government openness,
develop a global government openness index (GGOI) for assessing the progress of government openness and
investigate how the factors contribute to the advancement of open government by individual countries and
country groups by income.
Design/methodology/approach –This study identifies the four factors and adopts them into four
variables for making GGOI: accountability (ACC), citizen participation and freedom (CPF), transparency
(TRA) and information and communication technology (ICT). To calculate GGOI, panel data for 134 countries
from 2006 to 2015 were used.
Findings –GGOI scores constantly improved with an annual growth rate of 2.09 percent. Countries with
high ACC values tend to have high TRA scores, resulting in high GGOI scores. While the differences in ACC
and TRA were steady over the period, ICT increased the most in all groups. To boost ICT performance as a
channel to support other variables, middle-income countries should make further effort for citizens to use ICT
capabilities toward enhancing the levels of CPF and TRA.
Research limitations/implications –This study presents a global picture of the advancement of open
government and provides insights into specific areas that can be diagonalized.
Practical implications –The GGOI could be used as a useful assessment tool to measure theprogress of
governmentopenness in countriesand implement policiesand action plansfor improving governmentopenness.
Originality/value –The GGOI covers the areas related to legal, administrative, participatory and
technological factors and provides the factors’inter-relationships for the composition of GGOI.
Keywords Accountability, Transparency, Information and communication technology, Open government,
Citizen participation and freedom, Global government openness index
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Open government has become one of the hotly ongoing issues around the world. To support
the open government movement, many countries have made a series of substantial efforts
and have taken actions through open government initiatives and projects. In particular, to
evaluate the progress of open government advancement, several measurement tools or
indices have been developed with various methods and different focuses. Regardless of the
attempts, as open government has broad and complex features, a consensus has not yet
been reached with regard to which factors should be considered. In line with this view, this
study aims to examine the major factors that are used in existing studies and, with the
identified factors, to evaluate the progress of government openness in countries and
investigate the relationship between these factors and the income levels of the countries.
This study is organized into the following sections. The second section explains the four main
concepts related to the assessment of open government with previous studies and existing
indices. The third section describes data sources and data design of the study. The fourth section Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 72 No. 1, 2020
pp. 17-33
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-04-2019-0083
Received 10 April 2019
Revised 13 August 2019
Accepted 16 September 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
Wankeun Oh gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Hankuk University of Foreign
Studies Research Fund 2019.
17
Progress
of open
government
explains the method used in the study, data analysis and results of the study. The fifth section
discusses the important points drawn from the results and the recommendations for county
groups. The sixth section concludes with a summary of the study and future study plans.
Factors in assessing open government
The concept of open government is not simple to define, as it contains multiple aspects and
factors. One of the more credible definitions has been made by the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (2009), “the transparency of government actions,
the accessibility of government services and information and the responsiveness of
government to new ideas, demands and needs”(p. 113). Chiviru (2017) sees open
government as the process of proactively providing citizens with the necessary data,
information and knowledge of government processes. This perspective highlights that open
government provides a level of accessibility to its citizens to the government and
government data in order to participate in government decision making. In this regard, it is
agreed that open government ultimately aims to increase three aspects: transparency,
accountability and participation (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, 2017).
To understand the progress of open government, Lee and Kwak (2012) proposed the
five-leveled open government implementation model by emphasizing public engagement
using social media (e.g. initial conditions, data transparency, open participation, open
collaboration and ubiquitous engagement). Veljkovićet al. (2014) analyzed data available at
government open data portal sites in assessing open government. These models take into
account open government within the open government data framework. Worthy (2015)
highlighted that the three democratic aims of open data in the UK are increased
accountability, public participation and information transmission. He examined the
publication of all local government spending over £500 and remarked that any assessment
of open data research is complicated by a broader disagreement in its literature (Worthy,
2015). As long as there is no uniform agreement on the factors of open government and their
direct and indirect effects in progressing open government, the existing indices are likely to
use their different perspectives and approaches. The question of what factors are considered
for evaluating open government is still in dispute.
When considering the assessment of open government, accountability is primarily
included because it has been traditionally considered as the fundamental pillar of
structuring open government (Open Government Standards, 2013a). According to the OGP
(2016), which publicized the Open Government Declaration in 2011 and has led the open
government movement around the world, accountability refers to “rules, regulations and
mechanisms that call upon government actors to justify their actions, criticisms or
requirements made of them, and accept responsibility for failure to perform with respect to
laws or commitments”(p. 3). The OGP (2016) addressed the four dimensions to assess the
state of member countries’commitment and action plans on open government, such as
accountability, citizen participation, transparency, and technology and innovation. The
Access Info Europe addresses that rules, regulations and legal mechanisms must be in place
when elected and public officials carry out the administration of public power and spend
public funds with integrity for the public good (Open Government Standards, 2013a). From
this approach, accountability is represented as the legal dimension of constructing open
government. To emphasize a legal dimension, the Open Government Index (OGI), developed
by the World Justice Project (2017), assesses the state of open government with a focus on
legal rights, public availability, right to information, and civil rights and provides
individual, regional and global scores and rankings for countries. Some studies investigate
the access to information act or freedom of information act as important legal factors in
assessing government advancements (Kuunifaa, 2012; Omotayo, 2015; Worthy, 2015;
Razzano, 2016; Svärd, 2017, 2018). Because access to information is dealt with as a basic
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AJIM
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