Introduction to the special issue on government transparency
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852311435639 |
| Subject Matter | Introduction |
International
Review of
Administrative
Introduction
Sciences
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
78(1) 3–9
! The Author(s) 2012
Introduction to the special issue
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852311435639
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Albert J. Meijer
Utrecht University
Government transparency has become ‘hot’ since President Barack Obama put
transparency high on his agenda for change in government. He emphasized that
openness is needed to restore the trust of citizens in government. President Obama
is certainly not the only nor the first political leader to highlight the importance of
transparency and open government. Political leaders all around the world pay
tribute to the idea of open government and they have launched initiatives to
make their government more open and transparent.
Transparency gained even more momentum since Wikileaks obtained worldwide
media attention for opening up government to external scrutiny. Classified gov-
ernment cables were passed on to Wikileaks by a whistleblower and the informa-
tion was published on the Internet and newspapers. The traditional logic of
government transparency – government granting citizens access to information if
there were no restrictions such as privacy or national security – seemed to be
replaced by the logic of radical transparency: leak, publish and wait for public
outrage (Roberts, this issue). The Wikileaks affair also turned transparency from
something rather ‘dull’ into something ‘sexy’. Suddenly, everybody became inter-
ested in government transparency.
There has been much political and media attention for government transparency
but academic attention seems to be lagging behind. This special issue presents the
best papers from a workshop on government transparency at the Utrecht School of
Governance in November 2010. The workshop was organized within the context of
the conference ‘Public Matters’, and selected researchers were invited to present
their work. The objective of the workshop was to enhance our understanding of
key conceptual and empirical issues in the study of government transparency. The
workshop brought together some of the key transparency researchers in Europe,
the United Kingdom and the United States. The workshop was videotaped and the
results are available online (see www.albert-meijer.nl). The authors of the papers
were invited to turn their work into journal articles to bring this state-of-the-art
overview of transparency researcher to a broader audience.
Corresponding author:
Albert J. Meijer, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Email: a.j.meijer@uu.nl
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International Review of Administrative Sciences 78(1)
This special issue is an attempt to advance the academic debate on government
transparency. The debate about transparency in government is fragmented and
strong conceptualizations are lacking; their absence leads to much confusion in
academic debates about transparency. A normative debate about government trans-
parency has been going on for some time and interesting empirical work has been
conducted in the (recent) past. This empirical work, however, has been rather frag-
mented and it has not yet led to a common body of knowledge. More convergence
has been created lately and transparency research is slowly turning into a full-fledged
field of research. An important milestone was the First International Conference on
Transparency Research (Newark, May 2010) and regional conferences on transpar-
ency research will be organized in the coming years in Utrecht (Netherlands) in June
2012 and on Barbados in 2013. Additionally, a strong symposium on transparency
research has been created at the International Research Symposium on Public
Management since 2010. In sum, while previously transparency was often...
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