Building the Glass House: Transparency and Civic Capital across Italian municipalities

Giuseppe Albanese, Emma Galli (), Ilde Rizzo and Carla Scaglioni ()
Additional contact information
Emma Galli: Università di Roma "La Sapienza"
Carla Scaglioni: Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria

Working papers from Società Italiana di Economia Pubblica

Abstract: Our paper explores one particular channel through which social capital affects political outcomes, that is transparency. Citizens who share social values are more inclined to get information via transparency and monitor public activity. Thus, we first investigate whether social capital affects the transparency of public action, using a new dimension of the quality of institutions that has not investigated so far; then, we verify if transparency affects the relationship between social capital and the accountability of politicians. We find that civic capital positively affects transparency, suggesting that the quality of the social environment provides an incentive for public agents to become more transparent and therefore more accountable. Our results are robust to different samples and endogeneity concerns.

Keywords: Transparency; civic capital; political accountability; local governments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H3 K2 K4 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-law, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.siepweb.it/siep/wp/wp-content/uploads/r ... t_al_WP_SIEP_750.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ipu:wpaper:84

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Società Italiana di Economia Pubblica Società Italiana di Economia Pubblica Corso Strada Nuova 65 27100 Pavia Italia.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Monica Bozzano ().