Government transparency: State of the art and new perspectives (Elements in public policy). By Gregory Porumbescu, Albert Meijer, Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. £17.00 (paperback)
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| Author | Michal Plaček |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12920 |
BOOK REVIEW
Government transparency: State of the art and new perspectives
(Elements in public policy)
By Gregory Porumbescu, Albert Meijer, Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 2022. £17.00 (paperback)
Michal Plaˇ
cek
Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Praha, Czech Republic
Transparency has often been seen as a magic pill that could cure most of the problems facing the public sector in all
countries. These problems relate mainly to corruption, accountability, performance measurement, and citizen partici-
pation in decision making. The authors of the book Government Transparency: State of the Art and New Perspectives
argue that the benefits of transparency may not meet expectations and are not always linear. The authors' key argu-
ment is that transparency effects depend on context. To understand why transparency produces the intended
effects in some contexts, for example in fighting government corruption, and is not as successful in other contexts,
for example in improving performance, it is necessary to take into account how institutional (macro) and organiza-
tional (meso) contexts interact with individual behavior (micro).
The authors develop their argument in a relatively condensed space. The book has 7 chapters and 66 pages of
text without references. The book's basic approach is a systematic literature review.
In the first chapter, “The Need for a Layered Understanding of Public Administration Transparency,”the authors
define their concept of transparency, which theywork with throughout the book.In the authors' conception, transpar-
ency means:“the availability of information about an organization or actorallowing external actorsto monitor the inter-
nal workings or performance of that organization.”(p.1). In the first subchapter, the authors give an example in which
they describe the situation in the United States after the 2020 presidential election. The government decided to
increase public trust by livestreaming the administrative act of ballot counting through YouTube. Paradoxically, this
measure had the opposite of the intended effect and further increased distrust in the elections. This example is
followed by a subchapter describing the rise of transparency in the public sector. The authors link this rise to freedom
of informationlaws. The authors describethe clash between the expectations that societyhas for transparency andthe
reality, that is, the results that transparency has actually delivered. The key part of the first chapter is the subchapter
that discussesthe rationale of a layered approach to transparency. The authorsargue that “to truly understandgovern-
ment transparency, we need a ‘layered approach’that accounts for relationships between macro-level (institutional),
meso-level (organizational), and micro level (behavioral) perspectives.”and further argue that “connecting the institu-
tional, organizational,and behavioral perspectivesis essential to understanding the effectsof transparency.”(p. 5).
The second chapter offers a brief historical excursion into the transformation of transparency from initial idea to
social practice. The authors describe three historical lines of transparency as an idea, transparency as legislation, and
transparency as a practice. The authors devote one subchapter to each of these lines, presenting the historical over-
view from its inception to the present. The authors underline the influence of technology on the evolution of efforts
to put the idea of transparency into practice.
Received: 28 November 2022 Revised: 17 January 2023 Accepted: 15 February 2023
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12920
1198 © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Public Admin. 2023;101:1198–1200.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
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