The transparency of spanish political formations: an empirical study

Abstract

The main objective of Law 19/2013 on transparency, access to public information and good governance is to put into practice the right of citizens to access information in order to know the criteria under which decisions aimed at the application of public resources are taken, so that citizens can directly control the actions of public and private bodies, which fall under the scope of the aforementioned legislation, to which political parties also belong. In the context described, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the level of transparency achieved by political parties in Spain, through the information they provide on their respective official websites. To this end, two transparency indices were designed from an organisational and economic perspective on a sample of political parties with parliamentary representation since the establishment of democracy in Spain, in order to find out their transparency scores, as well as the relationship between both indices through the application of an econometric model. The results reveal a low level of transparency in most of the political groups analysed, both in the organisational and economic spheres, and a positive relationship was detected between the organisational and economic transparency indexes, especially influenced by the functionality of the websites of these entities.