Do Citizens See Through Transparency? Evidence from Survey Experiments in Peru

The global transparency bandwagon is large and growing. The Open Government Partnership, launched in September 2011 with eight founding governments, had grown to seventy governments by mid-2016. ¹ Among other things, member states commit to ‘increase the availability of information about governmental activities’ as part of the effort to ‘foster a global culture of open government that empowers and delivers for citizens, and advances the ideals of open and participatory 21^st century government’. ² Civil society organizations have promoted and joined this movement through networks such as the Partnership for Transparency Fund, which promotes openness in developing coountries and foreign aid donors, including the World Bank. ³ The World Bank, in turn, first developed a governance strategy promoting transparency in 2007 in which it argued that ‘building “capable, transparent and accountable” country institutions will be fundamental to ensuring sustainable development’. ⁴ Government officials in powerful states have been important cheerleaders for transparency, claiming, for example, that ‘transparency can be transformative. It can help build trust, efficiency and save lives’. ⁵

Despite these substantial efforts and claims about positive outcomes, we know relatively little about the actual effects of transparency and of the information transmitted by transparency efforts. In this article, we use a series of survey experiments conducted on the streets of Lima, Peru, to investigate a fairly simple question: what are the effects of government transparency and information on attitudes regarding support for the Peruvian political system? In the experiments, we asked subjects to watch short videos that highlighted information about Peru culled from online transparency portals sponsored by the Peruvian government. We then questioned respondents about their evaluations of the Peruvian system generally, their views of the regime’s performance, their trust in regime institutions, and their trust in local government. These four factors may be conceptualized as constituting important dimensions of system support or legitimacy, terms that we use interchangeably. ⁶

Concerns about the legitimacy of democratic governments in Latin America and other developing countries are widespread. Third-wave democracies remain wobbly in many parts of the world, unconsolidated or ‘partial’ and prone to democratic backsliding or reversals, ⁷ a process that could be caused in part by low or declining system support. ⁸ Low system support can become a self-perpetuating cycle...