82 | nº 31, pp. 63-86 | doxa.comunicación

July-December of 2020

Open political parties: applying the principles of Open Government to Spanish political affiliations

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

open parties. According to the experts, an open political party is one that demonstrates an attitude of openness toward the citizenry in its external and internal processes. To this end, they are transparent with respect to their information and accountable to the citizens. They also encourage deliberation, and therefore provide sufficient information to the population so that the stated discussion is based on knowledge of the issues being debated. Open parties give citizens the power to make some of the party’s decisions and they promote collaboration with diverse types of groups. This openness leads to greater democratisation of the processes of political parties and a closer relationship with citizens.

In the case under study, even though the percentage of openness of the political parties is above 50% of total openness (at 58.49% except in the case of Ciudadanos), they have important deficiencies in the Deliberation Section as well as in that of Decision-making and Collaboration, where they obtained an average of 50% and 33.92%, respectively.

Unidas Podemos was the only party that received a passing mark all three sections, with a final average of 66.74%, followed by the PSOE with 63.53%, the Partido Popular with 54.35%, and Ciudadanos with 49.37%. The effort that parties have made to improve transparency in recent years, which must continue to be developed, must also be evident in their participatory and collaborative processes. Thus, it is necessary for this openness to consist not only of the formal fulfilment of the indicators proposed in this research, but also of the commitment to become closer to citizens and be accountable to them based on the three pillars of open government.

With regard to transparency, which was the most developed section for all the parties, it is noteworthy that the section on active publicity related to the requirements of the Transparency Law did not obtain the best results, but instead, the highest numbers were related to the party’s accounts at 85.41%. This may be due to the requirements of the Political Party Financing Act having been included in the latter analysis. This regulation, unlike the LTABG, has a procedure for giving sanctions, which explains why the latter was not as developed. It is therefore clear that sanctions must be included in the LTABG in the event of non-compliance.

Table 6: Total results in the sections of active publicity

Source: Prepared by the author

There are certainly issues that need to be addressed. The absence of procedures for making requests for information from political parties stands out. It would be very interesting if the Political Party Financing Act included such procedures in the chapter on Access to Information in order to encourage this practice. Accessibility of the data published by the parties also needs to be improved, as the information must be published in re-usable formats (avoiding PDFs), and better