Making Sense of Open Government: A Conceptual Framework and Ideas for Future Research

In the last decade, open government has been considered a powerful tool for administrative reform and governance transformation, particularly through transparency improvements and citizen engagement strategies. Although extensive research has been conducted on open government during this period, most studies highlight its links to information access and transparency and do not explicitly analyze other components related to citizen engagement, such as participation and collaboration with the public or the role of information technologies as an important enabler of open government. Similarly, studies focused on open government have failed to clearly identify and explain several of its potential results, such as improved government performance, greater accountability, and enhanced legitimacy and trust in government—all themes studied in Public Administration for decades. The streams of research on open government’s components and results have generally developed in isolation from one another, each considering a limited number of variables, with relatively few attempts to systematically connect them. As an effort to begin addressing this gap, this article proposes an open government framework that integrates multiple concepts related to open government and categorizes them as either constitutive components or potential results. The article also suggests a few propositions that illustrate how the framework could be used to envision future studies.