Openness to information disclosure: The case of Czech rural municipalities

Abstract

Though information disclosure is an innate part of public corporate governance as well as an important help in the fight against corruption, only a limited research is done in this field. The objectives of the study therefore focus on the municipal website accessibility and the availability of municipal documents offered to the citizens. Primary data on the information disclosure were gathered through the website analysis of rural municipalities in the chosen region (n = 395). The study findings e.g. show that although about nine tenths (87%) of municipalities have their own website, the quality of the web accessibility (including the web existence, web uptodatedness, and web address intuitiveness) was found in less than half (46%) of them only. Concerning the documents offered by the municipality, it is most common to publish the minutes from the municipal council meeting (71%). The information on the local nonprofits is provided by six tenths of the municipalities (60%) and the electronic periodicals were present in less than one third (28%) of the cases. The openness to publishing information also significantly varies according to the population of the municipality.