Spanish Autonomous Governments and Active Transsparency of their Digital Repositories. A Taxonomic Review

Abstract

Public administrations provide data about their performance, implementing the open government principles. With the aim of both quantifying the proactive disclosure of digital information from the Spanish Autonomous Communities in december 2013 and 2017, as well as looking for typologies, we will be using a self verification list inspired on the national law 19/2013 about transparency, access to public information and good government, which will assign a weight according to Tim Berners-Lee’s five star scale, and will allow us to formulate two indicators: open data transparency, which only gathers information from the open data websites, and global transparency, which expands the search to the transparency portals and the institutional web site. The outcome of the investigation shows that the disclosure levels are unsatisfactory overall and, although they have improved lately, they are only relevant for global transparency thanks to the development and contribution of the transparency portals, which overshadow the usefulness of the institutional web site. The typological analysis identifies two balanced conglomerates supporting the postulate of two opposing theories: agency and neo-institutional