Presence and location of Spanish municipal transparency portals

Abstract

Since 2015, Spanish local councils have had to comply with the Transparency Act, which includes the duty to publish information on their activity on a website, electronic headquarters, or transparency portal. To do so, they often have the help of provincial councils, autonomous communities, or the State. Previous studies on compliance with this rule ignored town councils with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, i.e., more than 90% of them. This paper presents an introductory analysis on the presence of transparency information on websites and transparency portals offered by municipalities of all populations. A sample of municipalities, divided into 14 population ranges, was studied, covering 20-30% of municipalities, extracted proportionally and randomly for each range and from each province. The analysis includes variables such as the existence of a municipal website and specific transparency portal, the connection and publicity between the two, and the minimum presence of information within such portals. Despite support from larger institutions, one out of six municipalities did not have a website, and half of the municipalities did not offer real information on transparency. The three main causes identified (in order) are that their transparency portals are empty, that they do not actively advertise their portal on the website, or to a lesser extent (one in ten) that they do not have a transparency portal. This result occurs mostly for municipalities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. The municipalities that do offer transparency information mainly use tools provided by the State, which are associated with an electronic site. Efforts by other (autonomous or provincial) institutions to promote transparency are also detected, although only massively in some provinces.