Accountability through Transparency:The Foundation of Rebuilding Trust between Government Officials and Citizens under Democratic Governance in Taiwan
Don-Yun Chen*
Abstract
Democratic accountability requires transparency. After electoral democratization has been achieved in Taiwan, citizens have become the bosses of the nation. However, because of the problem of information (or professional) asymmetry in democratic governance, citizens are usually bosses in name only. People's frustration over corruption in recent Taiwan has led the citizen-government trust relationship into a vicious cycle. It is urgent to rebuild trust by institutionally committing reforms which can place government activities under the sunlight or in a fishbowl. In this paper, the author utilizes the economics of information to analyze the reform efforts of promoting transparency through administrative procedural controls. The author concludes that: First, the central idea of administrative procedural controls is to solve the problems of information asymmetry between citizenry and government. Second, the moral ground for this reform is the idea that the property rights of government information belong to the citizenry. Third, the key effect of procedural openness is a reasonable linkage between the rules of the game and the ensuing results. Such a linkage is made possible by the designing of an information policy instrument with the nature of pre-commitment. Lastly, administrative procedural controls require responses to the problem of strategic reactions between those controlled personnel in the government and citizen controller outside of the government.
Keywords: transparency; accountability; trust; democratic governance; the Economics of Information
* Associate professor, Department of Public Administration, National Cheng-chi University. Specialties: Bureaucratic politics, Democratic governance, Policy analysis, e-governance, National health insurance policy. E-mail: donc@nccu.edu.tw.