How European Union policy actors use and assess the effectiveness of e-transparency

AuthorMark Field
Published date01 January 2019
DOI10.1177/0952076717725576
Date01 January 2019
Subject MatterArticles
Article
How European Union
policy actors use and
assess the effectiveness
of e-transparency
Mark Field
School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of
Portsmouth, UK
Abstract
To counter the charge that it is an elite-driven political project, the European Union
increasingly uses online systems to render its working practices visible to its citizens.
This article analyses how the actors involved in European Union policy-making under-
stand the benefits derived from providing information through e-transparency, and
examines whether they consider that the e-transparency systems deliver these benefits.
Drawing on data from 63 semi-structured interviews with officials, Members of the
European Parliament and Brussels-based transparency campaigners, the article shows a
wide variation in participants’ views concerning the rationale for e-transparency.
It shows that e-transparency is variously seen as the means to address declining citizen
trust in the Brussels institutions; as a mechanism through which citizens can participate
in European Union processes and as a means of holding its institutions to account.
The article argues that these various e-transparency attributes are contradictory, and it
advances a framework for information providers to assess how the e-transparency
tools can best meet the differing requirements of transparency users.
Keywords
Accountability, citizen participation, e-government, transparency, trust
Introduction
In a speech to the European Parliament (EP) in May 2016, Commission Vice
President Timmermans stated that ‘Transparency is one of the few tools we have
to reconnect with citizens who are sceptical of our legislature’ (White, 2016). While
Public Policy and Administration
2019, Vol. 34(1) 42–61
!The Author(s) 2017
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076717725576
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Corresponding author:
Mark Field, School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth, Burnaby Road,
Portsmouth PO1 3AS, UK.
Email: mark.field@port.ac.uk
a growing antipathy towards mainstream politics is not peculiar to the European
Union (EU), Timmermans’ statement speaks to the particular challenge of coun-
tering the EU’s public image as an elite-driven political project.
1
To mitigate the charge that the EU is too remote, it increasingly uses online
systems to render its working practices visible to its citizens. There is not, however,
a single model of e-transparency, with dif‌ferent EU institutions having varying and
sometimes contradictory logics for using e-transparency to reconnect with the
public. This article explains how dif‌ferent groups of EU policy actors understand
the benef‌its derived from providing information through e-transparency systems
and examines whether they consider the e-transparency tools to be ef‌fective in
delivering these benef‌its. Using data drawn from 63 semi-structured interviews
with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), of‌f‌icials from the EU institu-
tions and representatives of transparency advocacy groups, this article reveals clear
dif‌ferences between the rationale for e-transparency between elected representa-
tives, unelected of‌f‌icials and campaigners. By considering and explaining how
e-transparency is intended to serve multiple purposes, the article adds to the rela-
tively small but growing body of empirical transparency studies (Douglas and
Meijer, 2016; Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2013) and contributes to the wider discourse
about the functioning of e-government (Ionescu, 2015; Welch, 2012).
The article proceeds as follows. The f‌irst section shows that scholars def‌ine and
conceptualise transparency and e-transparency in dif‌ferent ways and identif‌ies the
overlaps between the literature on transparency in general and e-transparency in
particular. The second section explains the paper’s data-gathering approach before
section three describes the research f‌indings. Section four discusses the implications
of the distinct dif‌ferences among policy actors concerning the purpose and ef‌fect-
iveness of e-transparency. Overall, the article shows that e-transparency is used by
dif‌ferent actors and groups to serve dif‌ferent purposes and that, in ef‌fect, this leads
to multiple transparencies that can create a complex and often contradictory trans-
parency picture.
While there is growing academic interest in EU transparency, the ongoing f‌inan-
cial crisis has provided the backdrop for recent work, most of which has explored
transparency in the context of the EU’s corporate and f‌inancial sectors (Bellenca
and Vandernoot, 2014; Horvath and Vasko, 2016). This article focuses instead on
transparency as it is practiced in the public realm. Before considering these per-
spectives in detail, however, the article considers how the terms transparency,
e-transparency and ef‌fectiveness are def‌ined and conceptualised.
Defining and conceptualising transparency and e-transparency
Transparency
Academic def‌initions of transparency tend to focus on either its process or purpose,
although with some overlap. For the former, the emphasis is on the degree to
Field 43

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