The legal‐normative conditions of police transparency: A configurational approach to open data adoption using qualitative comparative analysis
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12319 |
| Author | Alex Ingrams |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The legal-normative conditions of police
transparency: A configurational approach to open
data adoption using qualitative comparative
analysis
Alex Ingrams
Tilburg School of Politics and Public
Administration, Tilburg University, Tilburg Law
School, The Netherlands
Correspondence:
Alex Ingrams, Tilburg School of Politics and
Public Administration, Tilburg University,
Tilburg Law School, Warandelaan 2, 5037 AB
Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Email: a.r.ingrams@uvt.nl
In the United States, there is mounting political pressure on public
agencies to publish internal data. But transparency policy innova-
tion brings a unique set of legal and normative challenges regard-
ing how sensitive information will be used. It is therefore an open
question as to what legal-normative conditions favour innovation.
Are there specific kinds of laws, rules, or normative conditions that
are related to adoption of new, potentially risky, transparency poli-
cies? In this article, qualitative comparative analysis with secondary
data from multiple sources is used to find out what configurations
of conditions are associated with open data use in 122 police
departments. Results show three different paths to innovation
among police departments: mandate driven, city-stakeholder con-
vergence, and network learning. The findings are examined and
developed through interviews with experts from a national police
transparency initiative.
1|INTRODUCTION
Public administration scholars are interested in how new policies are developed or existing policies adapted in new
ways through innovation (Rogers and Kim 1983; Ingraham 1993; Hartley 2005; Osborne and Brown 2011). Accord-
ing to Roberts and King (2000, p. 304), policy innovation is ‘an attempt to mobilize an innovative system –a set of
ideas connecting people in multiple transactions, the thrust of which is to forge a new policy or procedure to guide
public action’. Policy innovation can happen either formally through formal collaborative partnerships, through legal
mandates, or by organizational policy learning and adaptation initiatives (Mossberger and Wolman 2003; Berry and
Berry 2014), or it can happen informally when organizations draw from the same environment of institutional
norms, values, and technologies (Lah and Perry 2008; Shipan and Volden 2012).
Recent research on policy innovation has provided scholars with a more nuanced picture of variation in innova-
tion antecedents depending on policy area (Walker et al. 2011). In the area of transparency policy, highly legally and
normatively complex conditions appear to shape policy innovation. Important public values are pursued in
Correction added on 23 April 2019, after first online publication: Appendix 1 has been updated in this current version.
DOI 10.1111/padm.12319
Public Administration. 2017;95:527–545.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd527
transparency policy because public organizations open up ‘the working procedures not immediately visible to those
not directly involved’in order to deliver accountability, better services, and public trust in new ways (Moser 2001).
But by opening up information, public organizations potentially present themselves with significant legal and norma-
tive challenges (e.g. Borrás and Jacobsson 2004; Piotrowski and Van Ryzin 2007; Bannister and Connolly 2011).
The licensing and legal basis for data re-use in open data policies is fraught with privacy and civil liberties issues
(Peterson 1995; Osborne and Brown 2011). Empirical studies also show that public managers sometimes worry that
policy innovation in the area of information and communications technology (ICT) will be normatively opposed by
traditional hierarchical relationships and bureaucratic authority (e.g. Meijer and Torenvlied 2014), and that transpar-
ency will lead to organizational inefficiency (Bannister and Connolly 2011).
Therefore, to be innovative with transparency policy, public agencies may need a certain configuration of
favourable legal and normative conditions. Research on policy innovation has not yet addressed this topic of legal
and normative transparency conditions despite the fact that it is a growing challenge to public management. The
research in this article is motivated by this problem to explore the legal-normative conditions that encourage public
organizations to innovate with openness. Scott (2008a, p. 54) describes legal and normative conditions as two ingre-
dients of processes of organizational change such as innovation. Legal conditions comprise regulatory influences
involving ‘rule-setting, monitoring, and sanctioning’factors such as laws and regulations, while normative conditions
involve ‘prescriptive, evaluative, and obligatory’factors such as values, social pressures, and moral guidance. The
term ‘legal-normative’is adopted throughout the article following Mashaw (1990, p. 272) to connote the treatment
of legal and normative conditions in the same theoretical framework.
The article will investigate open data in police departments. This is a case of transparency innovation where
legal-normative questions are highly complex (OSJI 2015). The specific question addressed by the research is: what
configurations of legal-normative conditions are associated with open data use in police departments? In the broad-
est sense, open data means ‘non-privacy-restricted and non-confidential data which is produced with public money
and is made available without any restrictions on its usage or distribution’(Janssen et al. 2012, p. 259). In law
enforcement agencies, open data is a type of transparency policy that seeks to make the internal activities of police
departments transparent to citizens in hopes of engendering better behaviour by police and holding them accounta-
ble for misdemeanours; this is ‘inward’transparency in Heald’s (2012) sense. The research uses a combination of
crisp set and fuzzy set methods of qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA and fsQCA, respectively) and interviews
with police open data practitioners to explore possible configurations of legal-normative conditions and develop our
understanding of transparency policy innovation mechanisms. The results of the analysis will be discussed with ref-
erence to existing knowledge of transparency policies and practitioner points.
2|THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The theoretical framework for legal-normative conditions and transparency innovation follows Scott’s (2008a,
2008b) institutional perspective. According to Scott (2008b, p. 429), combinations of these conditions ‘provide cog-
nitive schema, normative guidance, and rules’that shape organizational processes. The discussion of legal-normative
conditions here is tied to the unique conditions expected to be associated with open data in policing in the United
States. Three kinds of legal conditions are relevant to open data adoption: freedom of information (FOI) laws and
open data legislation at the state level and mandates at the city level. For the normative conditions, there are two
kinds: policy learning through networks and city pressures associated with large populations.
2.1 |Legal conditions
State-level legislation addressing transparency is expected to be an important legal condition. FOI is a vital part of
the legal environment of transparency policies because it is a first step in the institutionalization of transparency
528 INGRAMS
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