Influence of socio-economic, financial-budgetary and political-electoral aspects on the transparency of local governments

Abstract This study aims to analyze the influence of socioeconomic, financial-budgetary and political-electoral aspects on the active and passive transparency of Brazilian local governments. From 3,550 Brazilian municipalities, a resampling of 100,000 samples was performed using the multiple linear regression method with cross-sectional data, obtaining better data robustness and reliability. The results indicate that in larger municipalities there is a greater propensity to actively disseminate information to reduce agency costs. A population with higher per capita income and better educated tend to demand more information, seeking to know where is the taxpayers’ money invested. Capital investments are important to society, so it is expected that the level of transparency will be higher where there is more spending of this kind. Electoral competition require public managers to be more transparent toward their opponents and population to confirm their pre-election promises.