Articulo_1_EN_Doxa_28

narratives affect the results of political action. For this reason, this capacity has special interest in the study of political communication of a public nature. The participants involved (town councils, governments, and public law bodies have the express goal of modifying the environment that surrounds them and of affecting citizens’ lives.

Political communication of public institutions is established as a preliminary step for transparency and accountability. Better understanding of public policies reduces complexity and opens spaces for deliberation (Brugué, 2014). Public information must be oriented toward the creation of knowledge, or in other words, the capacity to understand the consequences of decisions taken in a complex environment. The complexity of the design and implementation of public policies requires a transverse approach. Technology has modified the scope of common interests and their representation, and thereby affects political projects. Prats (2005) links public management with knowledge management and the deployment of networks, with citizen interaction and participation being outside of the bureaucratic circuit and political parties. Informed citizens make better decisions in the sense that they can guide the policies of administration with real, specific proposals. There is academic literature on the negative impact of the absence of information on decision-making. In this sense, Zafra, Plata, Pérez and López (2015) indicate that citizens who do not have access to updated municipal information are not able to evaluate public services. In a previous study, they had already pointed out the advantages of evaluating municipal management through the dissemination on digital platforms of comparable indicators (Zafra, López and Hernández, 2009).

In the legal environment, public information improves the evaluation of political projects (Alfaro and Gómez, 2016), broadens the exercise of fundamental rights (Guichot, 2014), and hinders corruption (Villoria, 2016). Management of public information leads to professionalization in the dissemination of municipal information according to professional criteria, which is closer to journalism than to mere administrative language. Manfredi, Corcoy and Herranz (2017: 415) define this criterion as:

(...) the availability of real, tangible information on the behaviour of the municipal government, the degree of compliance with budgets, the management of collective resources, the provision of a government plan, among other items. In other words, the mayor’s role is diminished, and the role of the opposition and civil society is renewed. Finally, there is the need to rethink the journalistic narrative in the sense of articulating messages, giving depth and context to the news, and explaining the background of the municipal news.

Therefore, professionalization of public information consists of the ability to organize and publish documents that affect citizens. With access to better quality public information, citizens can make decisions, evaluate policies and propose initiatives that affect them. This is in line with Bellver’s suggestion (2007: 44) when he explains that “breaking the information monopoly empowers civil society”, while Baack (2015: 4) connects data publication with a new paradigm of participation: “Open data sharing makes the process of data interpretation transparent and breaks the government’s monopoly, which means that anyone can create their own interpretation of the data that the government uses to make and justify its own decisions”.

Communication oriented toward increasing social participation in public decisions finds its place in the theories of Moore (1998) for the creation of public value. Citizens can propose the provision of specific services, according to their preferences,