Digital transparency and Web 2.0 in Spanish city councils

The purpose of this study is to provide a Web 2.0 Disclosure Index to measure the Web 2.0 presence of Spanish city councils and the information disclosed by them on these media, and to test whether the use of Web 2.0 tools and social media by local governments improve their Web 1.0 digital transparency. We have structured the Web 2.0 Index as the sum of three partial indexes, referred to presence, the content and the interactivity of the Web, and we have estimated these indexes by a content analysis of the city council's websites. We find that the use of Web 2.0 tools has an essentially ornamental focus, and thus it is necessary to increase the content disclosed, especially at the information level. The results also show that, although there is a positive relationship between the Web 1.0 information transparency and the presence of the city councils on social media, and their intensity of use, the effect on transparency is basically ornamental, focused on general information. We also find that those city councils that obtain better Web 1.0 scores also have higher scores in the Web 2.0 setting, but are more focused on promotional issues than on the disclosure of information about the entities' management.