Open Active Transparency in Spain: Regional Conglomerates and the Role of Accounting Information

Abstract

Active transparency is developed through the provision of information by public administrations. However, for this information to be reusable, it must be offered through free licenses and open formats, two characteristics present in open data. This paper aims to investigate the disclosure of information associated with active transparency that Spanish autonomous communities performed through open data in December 2023, ten years after the approval of Law 19/2013 on transparency, access to public information, and good governance, indicating their performance for comparison among them. Despite the modest magnitude of the observed scores, the disparities among the autonomous communities are substantial. Consequently, the cluster analysis identifies distinct groups of communities, which have been designated as “advanced”, “intermediate”, and “lagging”. Furthermore, while the balance between the accounting data block and the information block pertaining to the governors and the destination of spending is achieved for two-thirds of the autonomous communities, the remaining third exhibits a notable dearth of attention to accounting information.