Open Parliaments in Latin America: Active Transparency and Citizen Participation

Abstract

In recent times, modernising trends towards an open state model have led to the transformation of public institutions, including parliament. This new approach is based on the axes of transparency, accountability and participation in order to improve the relationship/communication between parliament, and citizens and to strengthen its democratic legitimacy. This article aims to investigate this issue by assessing the transparency and citizen participation on the websites of the lower houses of national parliaments in Latin America to determine whether they are limited to complying with the requirements of the regulations or whether they go further and, therefore, move towards a true culture of open parliament. To address this question, an analytical framework has been generated that is composed of four dimensions (widely recognised in the academic literature) to which a series of indicators are linked: information about parliament (19 indicators); information about parliamentary organisation, functioning and activity (19 indicators); economic and contractual information (17 indicators); and communication and relationship with citizens (30 indicators). In short, the results of the research will provide a diagnosis of the situation that will help to verify that an open parliamentary style has not yet been fully established in Latin America, and also to make a series of reasonable recommendations for developing this new model of lower house.