INFORMATION OPENNESS OF PUBLIC ADVISORY COUNCILS IN ST. PETERSBURG: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CONDITIONS
Keywords:
public advisory councils, information openness, public policy, qualitative comparative analysisAbstract
Information openness of public advisory councils is an important but underexplored indicator of their role in public policy. It reflects their activities, as well as the feedback mechanisms between citizens and councils. Scholars point out low information quality on federal and regional levels, but the reasons behind that rarely studied, especially from a comparative perspective. This paper attempts to fill in this gap by revealing the conditions leading to greater information openness. The authors choose St. Petersburg as a case and gather a dataset on 46 public councils. The key research method is the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The framework is built on two expectations: the impact of councils’ autonomy (in website management and general organization) and the role of councils (“intermediary” or “expert”) on information openness.Due to several limitations, the results have not revealed any conditions which can be considered a guarantee for better openness. However, the preliminary conclusion is that the differences in autonomy and roles are important conditions. The autonomy of councils seems to be the most crucial factor. A valuable contribution of this paper is the framework of analysis that can be used for other cases and research strategies.DOI: 10.17072/2218-1067-2021-2-129-141References
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