Assessing citizens' preferences and level of trasparency in government :how big is the gap?

Transparency promises to heal governments by enhancing their relationships with constituents and improving their capacity to meet their objectives. Many countries refer to transparency as the right to access information, but also as a tool to enhance governments' efficiency and accountability, whilst reducing the opportunities for corruption. Some studies show that the practice of transparency is still limited to some policy areas or to comply with law requirements (Heald 2006). Information and communication technologies (ICT) promise to enhance governments' accessibility and openess. However, due to ICT, in most cases, government produce too much information that does not necessarely meet their constituents' needs. As a consequence to enhance transparency and to make governments work better and more efficiently (Norris, 2001; Northrop et al, 1990), they would have to enbed in their transparency strategy citizens' preferences for government information. This should contribute to reach further levels of tangible rather than formal transparency and eventually contribute to facilitate government-constituents relations. The purpose of this paper is twofold: it assesses governments' levels of transparency and citizens' need for government information in order to assess whether there is a gap and it offers recommendations to reduce it.