Transparency, civic capital and political accountability: A virtuous relation?

Abstract

Our paper investigates the intertwined relation among transparency, civic capital and political accountability in a large sample of Italian municipalities using a new indicator of institutional transparency. Firstly, we test the hypothesis that civic capital affects transparency of public administrations; secondly, we verify whether in municipalities where civic capital is high, citizens’ attention toward government accountability is also high, making it politically unfeasible to disregard the demand for transparency. We find that civic capital positively affects transparency and the latter, in turn, is politically rewarding for the local administrators only conditional to the level of civic capital. Our findings are robust to different samples and endogeneity concerns.