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PP 437
Implementing a Transparency Law on the Local Level and Its Consequences on the Spanish Councils Websites. A Comparative Study
P.L. Pérez Díaz
1
, E. Arroyas Langa
1
, C. Berná Sicilia
1
, R. Zamora Medina
2
, M. Rebolledo de la Calle
3
, J. Rodríguez Virgili
3
1
Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, Department of Journalism, Guadalupe Murcia, Spain
2
Universidad de Murcia, Department of Information and Documentation, Espinardo Murcia, Spain
3
Universidad de Navarra, Department of Public Communication, Pamplona Navarra, Spain
Citizens disaffection towards institutions is growing. Communication is a key element for institutions regaining trust and credibility among citizens. To do
this, the transparency management and the promotion of citizen participation are two essential aspects. The Spanish Transparency Law, approved on De‑
cember 2013, was not fully in force at the regional and local level until December 2015. From that day, all city councils in Spain were required by law to show
all the information on their websites published in a clear, structured and understandable way. This requirement turns the Spanish local administrations
into an interesting case study to assess the efforts to improve the relationship with its citizens at the local context. In this paper we start from two basic
assumptions. On one hand, the websites of the Spanish councils reveal accountability deficiencies lead by governments. Such lack of information affects
its role as trustee sources of information media, blurring and sometimes contaminating public debate, and creating distrust among citizens. On the other
hand, digital technologies can reduce these deficiencies and thus to reawaken interest among citizens in the assessment of political activity and democratic
control. The main objective of this study is to analyze and to assess how digital technologies are used on websites municipalities, that is, research resources,
traits and practices of public communications made by municipalities across the web. We relevant local institutions as case studies because of the increased
level of trust that citizens have in them, compared with institutions of national character due to its proximity.This analysis will allow us to know how easy (or
weakened) citizen involvement by monitoring and evaluating the management of local governments.This paper focuses on the comparison of the websites
of all the councils of two single-province autonomous communities, Comunidad Foral de Navarra and Región de Murcia, before and after the entry into force
of the law. Our first analysis was widely promoted and covered by the media, in order to make political and technical managers felt encouraged to promote
improvements. Our second wave of analysis, after the due date given to the city councils to adapt their websites to the law served us to check if those
betterments were effective. In sum, our sample consists of 317 websites. Regarding the methodology, websites were evaluated through 52 basic indicators
corresponding to 4 questions: who are the political representatives, how they manage collective resources, how they inform about this management, and
which tools they publish in order to facilitate citizens participation. We used a digital platform to evaluate data from the information provided by the web‑
sites of the municipalities and to automatically quantify the results of the evaluation, plotted graphically according to a scale.