Open active transparency in Spain: Regional conglomerates and the role of accounting information

Curto-Rodríguez, Ricardo; Marcos-Sánchez, Rafael; Ferrández, Daniel Article Open active transparency in Spain: Regional conglomerates and the role of accounting information Administrative Sciences Provided in Cooperation with: MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, Basel Suggested Citation: Curto-Rodríguez, Ricardo; Marcos-Sánchez, Rafael; Ferrández, Daniel (2025) : Open active transparency in Spain: Regional conglomerates and the role of accounting information, Administrative Sciences, ISSN 2076-3387, MDPI, Basel, Vol. 15, Iss. 3, pp. 1-19, https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci15030080 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/321224 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Received: 21 January 2025 Revised: 20 February 2025 Accepted: 21 February 2025 Published: 25 February 2025 Citation: Curto-Rodríguez, R., Marcos-Sánchez, R., & Ferrández, D. (2025). Open Active Transparency in Spain: Regional Conglomerates and the Role of Accounting Information. Administrative Sciences,15(3), 80. https://doi.org/10.3390/ admsci15030080 Copyright: © 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/). Article Open Active Transparency in Spain: Regional Conglomerates and the Role of Accounting Information Ricardo Curto-Rodríguez 1, Rafael Marcos-Sánchez 2and Daniel Ferrández 3,* 1Business Administration, University of Oviedo, 33066 Oviedo, Spain; [email protected] 2Facultad de Educación, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), 26006 Logroño, Spain; [email protected] 3E.T.S. de Edificación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Avda. Juan de Herrera, 6, 28040 Madrid, Spain *Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: Active transparency is developed through the provision of information by public administrations. However, for this information to be reusable, it must be offered through free licenses and open formats, two characteristics present in open data. This paper aims to investigate the disclosure of information associated with active transparency that Spanish autonomous communities performed through open data in December 2023, ten years after the approval of Law 19/2013 on transparency, access to public information, and good governance, indicating their performance for comparison among them. Despite the modest magnitude of the observed scores, the disparities among the autonomous communities are substantial. Consequently, the cluster analysis identifies distinct groups of communities, which have been designated as “advanced”, “intermediate”, and “lagging”. Furthermore, while the balance between the accounting data block and the information block pertaining to the governors and the destination of spending is achieved for two-thirds of the autonomous communities, the remaining third exhibits a notable dearth of attention to accounting information. Keywords: active transparency; autonomous communities; information disclosure; open data; Spain 1. Introduction and Conceptual Framework The effective consolidation of the right of access to public information is a contemporary phenomenon. With the exception of the Greek civilization, where the publicity of archives was part of their vision of Democracy, the period up to the modern age was characterized by limited access to information by leaders (Chiaretti,2013). This was until the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act of 1766, which granted the right of access to official documents, and the Finnish law of 1951, to perceive an incipient movement that was accompanied several years later by the relevant example of the American Freedom of Information Act of 1966. This legislation allowed anyone to access the records of federal agencies (with the exceptions provided for). It was accompanied by other similar laws in other pioneering countries such as Australia and New Zealand in 1982, Canada in 1983, Colombia in 1985, Hungary in 1992, Lithuania in 1996, Latvia in 1998, and the Czech Republic in 1999, consolidating a process that now has more than 100 countries with regulations in place. Spain was not one of the first countries to have a law to this effect; in fact, it has become the only country in the European Union with more than one million inhabitants without such regulations (Garriga,2013). Furthermore, the approval of the national law was Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci15030080 Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 2 of 19 subsequent to other regional laws: Galicia (Law 4/2006 extended by Law 1/2016); Balearic Islands (Law 4/2011); Navarra (Foral Law 11/2012 updated with Foral Law 5/2018) or Extremadura (Law 4/2013). In any case, the entry into force of the national law has contributed to an increase in the studies related to transparency in recent years (Rodríguez-Navas et al.,2017), constituting an impulse for the implementation of autonomous laws (Sierra-Rodríguez,2022). The fact is that, except for the Basque Country (curiously, the most developed in open government according to regional leaders as shown by the work of Curto-Rodríguez et al. (2024) which has a draft transparency bill approved at the end of 2023, all the autonomous Spanish regions have a law with this task, which can be consulted in the grouping made by the Council of Transparency and Good Governance of Spain (https://www.consejodetransparencia.es/ ct_Home/transparencia/transparencia-en-espanya.html) (accessed on 19 January 2025). The approval of National Law 19/2013 on transparency, access to public information, and good governance has also served to meet the commitments made to the Council of Europe and the Open Government Partnership (Beltrán-Orenes & Martínez-Pastor, 2017). The regulation has not been exempt from criticism. It has been described as late, unambitious (Serrano et al.,2017), with lights and shadows (Benítez-Palma,2018), and even as a great failure (Nuet,2015). Although the national regulations have recently been modified by Law 14/2022, on 8 July, amending Law 19/2013 on 9 December, regarding transparency, access to public information, and good governance (with the aim of regulating the statistics of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in public procurement), what concerns public administrations has not undergone any changes worth highlighting. Three conceptual blocks can still be identified: active transparency, the right to access public information, and the principles relating to good governance. Sections in the text are grouped into two distinct parts: transparency in public activity and access to public information (first title) and good governance (second title). Although certain articles of the regulations that are of special interest for the research are analyzed in more detail in the methodology section, it should be noted that the first title is the most relevant (especially that relating to transparency), a concept that we briefly delimit at a theoretical level. Transparency is related to accountability and legitimacy Brucato (2015), although it seems that there is no universal definition of transparency (Segijn et al.,2021). To define transparency is to speak of a broad concept related to the availability of information (Y. Wang,2020;Cerrillo-Martínez & Casadesús-de-Mingo,2021) and its accessibility and ease of use by citizens and stakeholders (Cifuentes-Faura et al.,2024). This openness aims to overcome hermeticism and opacity by promoting visibility and public exposure (ChamorroGonzález,2022), fostering trust since no one can trust what they do not know (Blanes, 2022). Therefore, transparency and access to information are two strongly related concepts since governments can only be transparent if they provide information about what it is they are doing (Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer,2012), share their databases, and disclose their action plans (Piedrabuena-Moraleda & Criado-Fernández,2013). Thus, the provision of information becomes essential to break the informational asymmetries between governors and governed (Esteller-Moré & Polo Otero,2012) so that the citizenry can build an opinion on the management performed (Galdámez-Morales,2019). While the legal regimes of transparency were intended to show the goodness of public policies in the management of resources (O. García,2022), over time, this transparency has become a tool of great importance, both to exercise public control and to promote accountability (Sánchez & Sierra,2020;Campos & Vaquero,2019;Osorio-Sanabria & Barreto- Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 3 of 19 Granada,2022), germinated in more recent developments such as in open governments or open data that overflow the initial concept (Rodrigo,2022). Mabillard and Keuffer (2020) distinguish three types of transparency. The first is called active transparency, which consists of the proactive disclosure of information on a voluntary basis (increasingly online through government applications and websites). The second is passive transparency, understood as the disclosure of information in response to a request. Finally, there is forced transparency, consisting of spontaneous and uncontrolled disclosure of information by parties external (or internal) to public administrations. This research focuses on active transparency but takes into consideration the important role that technology and open data play in this process. First, technology has undoubtedly played a fundamental role in promoting transparency (Rodríguez-Fernández & Vázquez-Sande,2019;Cruz-Meléndez & Pinacho,2020), contributing to trust in governments (Myeong et al.,2021) and to the process of evaluating their performance (Baek & Kim,2018), which can strengthen both their quality and effectiveness (Meijer & Rodríguez,2016). The Internet has been one of the innovations that have most transformed the public sphere (Moreno-Sardàet al.,2017;Masip et al.,2019), contributing to the improvement of information disclosure (Criado & Gil-Garcia,2019;Ruvalcaba-Gomez et al.,2019) and facilitating the unstoppable development in the provision of government open data (GiménezChornet,2012;Otero,2021). It is this synergy between technology and open data that is the starting point in achieving the three basic pillars of any open government: transparency, participation, and collaboration (Figure 1). Adm. Sci. 2025, 15, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 20 Barreto-Granada, 2022), germinated in more recent developments such as in open governments or open data that overflow the initial concept (Rodrigo, 2022). Mabillard and Keuffer (2020) distinguish three types of transparency. The first is called active transparency, which consists of the proactive disclosure of information on a voluntary basis (increasingly online through government applications and websites). The second is passive transparency, understood as the disclosure of information in response to a request. Finally, there is forced transparency, consisting of spontaneous and uncontrolled disclosure of information by parties external (or internal) to public administrations. This research focuses on active transparency but takes into consideration the important role that technology and open data play in this process. First, technology has undoubtedly played a fundamental role in promoting transparency (Rodríguez-Fernández & Vázquez-Sande, 2019; Cruz-Meléndez & Pinacho, 2020), contributing to trust in governments (Myeong et al., 2021) and to the process of evaluating their performance (Baek & Kim, 2018), which can strengthen both their quality and effectiveness (Meijer & Rodríguez, 2016). The Internet has been one of the innovations that have most transformed the public sphere (Moreno-Sardà et al., 2017; Masip et al., 2019), contributing to the improvement of information disclosure (Criado & Gil-Garcia, 2019; Ruvalcaba-Gomez et al., 2019) and facilitating the unstoppable development in the provision of government open data (Giménez-Chornet, 2012; Otero, 2021). It is this synergy between technology and open data that is the starting point in achieving the three basic pillars of any open government: transparency, participation, and collaboration (Figure 1). Figure 1. The role of technology and data in open government. Source: Criado and Guevara-Gómez (2021). Secondly, there is the role of open data. Public institutions produce and manage a huge volume of information that is published in an accessible way called open government data (Rangel-Carrillo et al., 2020), and, in recent years, there has been a strong interest in the administrations to disclose their data (V. Wang & Shepherd, 2020), both for their ability to improve service delivery (Myeong et al., 2014) and transparency (Kim & Eom, 2019), achieving more accountable governments (Hrustek et al., 2024). According to the Open Data Charter (https://opendatacharter.net/) (accessed on 19 January 2025), open data are digital data that are made available with the necessary technical and legal characteristics so that they can be freely used, reused, and redistributed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Figure 1. The role of technology and data in open government. Source: Criado and Guevara-Gómez (2021). Secondly, there is the role of open data. Public institutions produce and manage a huge volume of information that is published in an accessible way called open government data (Rangel-Carrillo et al.,2020), and, in recent years, there has been a strong interest in the administrations to disclose their data (V. Wang & Shepherd,2020), both for their ability to improve service delivery (Myeong et al.,2014) and transparency (Kim & Eom,2019), achieving more accountable governments (Hrustek et al.,2024). According to the Open Data Charter (https://opendatacharter.net/) (accessed on 19 January 2025), open data are digital data that are made available with the necessary technical and legal characteristics so that they can be freely used, reused, and redistributed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 4 of 19 Therefore, open data are more than a simple collection of information for two reasons: the first is that it is not enough to disseminate data in any way (but meeting several requirements such as the use of free licenses and reusable formats), and the second is that the information will be accompanied by metadata (additional data that contextualizes and enriches the information). Figure 2shows an example of a dataset. Adm. Sci. 2025, 15, x FOR PEER REVIEW 4 of 20 Therefore, open data are more than a simple collection of information for two reasons: the first is that it is not enough to disseminate data in any way (but meeting several requirements such as the use of free licenses and reusable formats), and the second is that the information will be accompanied by metadata (additional data that contextualizes and enriches the information). Figure 2 shows an example of a dataset. Figure 2. Dataset of the Government of Navarra Positions. Source: Navarre open data portal. As can be seen, the dataset shown in Figure 2 provides a list of Navarre government positions, including the organizational unit to which they belong and their contact details. It can be downloaded in csv, json, ods, tsv, xlsx, and xml formats, which makes it possible to meet the needs of different types of users. Its license is open, specifically Creative Commons BY, which is the least restrictive. The information is accompanied by additional elements such as update frequency, date of creation, department responsible, etc., which gives it greater value. In any case, the nature of open data is diverse, and, therefore, so is its usefulness. While value creation is one of the most important objectives of open data (Benmohamed et al., 2024), open data has been proposed as a solution to a wide range of public problems (Pozen, 2020). Promoting transparency (Lnenicka & Nikiforova, 2021), contributing to government openness (Zuiderwijk et al., 2019), publicizing the latest political information (Zhang et al., 2022), and disclosing government achievements (Emigawaty et al., 2023) are all aspects that have been identified as beneficial. The facilitation of democratic debate (Ruijer et al., 2024) and citizen participation (de Juana-Espinosa & Luján-Mora, 2019) are some of the virtues of the media, fostering trust in government institutions (Tubekova et al., 2023). It is not surprising, therefore, that open government data have experienced great growth, with these last years being a fundamental part of open government policies (González-Limón & Rodríguez-Ramos, 2019; Díez-Garrido & Melero-Lázaro, 2022) and being at the forefront to achieve more responsive (Kim & Eom, 2019) and intelligent (CerrilloMartínez, 2018) institutions by favoring the provision of services (Myeong et al., 2021). Figure 2. Dataset of the Government of Navarra Positions. Source: Navarre open data portal. As can be seen, the dataset shown in Figure 2provides a list of Navarre government positions, including the organizational unit to which they belong and their contact details. It can be downloaded in csv, json, ods, tsv, xlsx, and xml formats, which makes it possible to meet the needs of different types of users. Its license is open, specifically Creative Commons BY, which is the least restrictive. The information is accompanied by additional elements such as update frequency, date of creation, department responsible, etc., which gives it greater value. In any case, the nature of open data is diverse, and, therefore, so is its usefulness. While value creation is one of the most important objectives of open data (Benmohamed et al., 2024), open data has been proposed as a solution to a wide range of public problems (Pozen, 2020). Promoting transparency (Lnenicka & Nikiforova,2021), contributing to government openness (Zuiderwijk et al.,2019), publicizing the latest political information (Zhang et al., 2022), and disclosing government achievements (Emigawaty et al.,2023) are all aspects that have been identified as beneficial. The facilitation of democratic debate (Ruijer et al.,2024) and citizen participation (de Juana-Espinosa & Luján-Mora,2019) are some of the virtues of the media, fostering trust in government institutions (Tubekova et al.,2023). It is not surprising, therefore, that open government data have experienced great growth, with these last years being a fundamental part of open government policies (González-Limón & Rodríguez-Ramos,2019;Díez-Garrido & Melero-Lázaro,2022) and be- Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 5 of 19 ing at the forefront to achieve more responsive (Kim & Eom,2019) and intelligent (CerrilloMartínez,2018) institutions by favoring the provision of services (Myeong et al.,2021). However, let us remember that not all open data are amenable to fostering open government. The work “The New Ambiguity of Open Government” (Yu & Robinson,2011) clarifies this aspect through an example indicating that bus schedules may generate value or facilitate people’s day-to-day lives but have little relation to fostering transparency or accountability. Therefore, this research is restrictive in terms of the meaning of the concept of open government data by requiring the data to be open in format and to belong to the sphere of open government, as illustrated in Figure 3. Adm. Sci. 2025, 15, x FOR PEER REVIEW 5 of 20 However, let us remember that not all open data are amenable to fostering open government. The work “The New Ambiguity of Open Government” (Yu & Robinson, 2011) clarifies this aspect through an example indicating that bus schedules may generate value or facilitate people’s day-to-day lives but have little relation to fostering transparency or accountability. Therefore, this research is restrictive in terms of the meaning of the concept of open government data by requiring the data to be open in format and to belong to the sphere of open government, as illustrated in Figure 3. Figure 3. Open data supporting the development of open government. Source: United Nations (2013). After making this point, we proceed to point out several results achieved by Spain in different supranational studies related to transparency or open data, which allow us to contextualize the country’s overall performance at the international level. We begin with the Open Budget Survey. In the 2021 study, Spain scored 2 points for participation, 61 points for budget oversight, and 54 points for transparency, reaching 47th place out of 120 countries analyzed globally. Turning to specific studies on open data, it is worth noting that Spain could be considered a world leader in open data, with close to 300 open data portals from different institutions and levels of government (Abella et al., 2022). The OURData (Open-Useful-Reusable Data Index) study was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to evaluate the efforts made by governments in the design and implementation of national open data policies. This index, which analyzes aspects related to data access, availability, and support for its reuse, has been carried out in four editions, wherein Spain must be framed among the leading countries as it obtained the relevant positions in 2017 (sixth place), 2019 (eighth place), and 2023 (fifth position, after South Korea, France, Poland, and Estonia). The Open Data Maturity conducted by the European open data portal during the period 2015–2023 indicates that Spain obtained second position (2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 editions) and third position in 2021, moving back its valuations for the 2022 (seventh position) and 2023 (fifth position) editions. Once this introduction has been made and the theoretical framework of the paper has been presented, to help present the objective of the research, which is to value the attention to transparency that open data offers, the research is structured as follows. The second section deals with the methodology used and details the fieldwork carried out, followed by the main results in the third section. After the discussion and conclusions offered in the fourth section, the paper ends with the bibliographical references used in this research. Figure 3. Open data supporting the development of open government. Source: United Nations (2013). After making this point, we proceed to point out several results achieved by Spain in different supranational studies related to transparency or open data, which allow us to contextualize the country’s overall performance at the international level. We begin with the Open Budget Survey. In the 2021 study, Spain scored 2 points for participation, 61 points for budget oversight, and 54 points for transparency, reaching 47th place out of 120 countries analyzed globally. Turning to specific studies on open data, it is worth noting that Spain could be considered a world leader in open data, with close to 300 open data portals from different institutions and levels of government (Abella et al.,2022). The OURData (Open-Useful-Reusable Data Index) study was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to evaluate the efforts made by governments in the design and implementation of national open data policies. This index, which analyzes aspects related to data access, availability, and support for its reuse, has been carried out in four editions, wherein Spain must be framed among the leading countries as it obtained the relevant positions in 2017 (sixth place), 2019 (eighth place), and 2023 (fifth position, after South Korea, France, Poland, and Estonia). The Open Data Maturity conducted by the European open data portal during the period 2015–2023 indicates that Spain obtained second position (2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 editions) and third position in 2021, moving back its valuations for the 2022 (seventh position) and 2023 (fifth position) editions. Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 6 of 19 Once this introduction has been made and the theoretical framework of the paper has been presented, to help present the objective of the research, which is to value the attention to transparency that open data offers, the research is structured as follows. The second section deals with the methodology used and details the fieldwork carried out, followed by the main results in the third section. After the discussion and conclusions offered in the fourth section, the paper ends with the bibliographical references used in this research. 2. Methodology Spain has become one of the most decentralized countries in the world and probably the most decentralized in Western Europe (Rodríguez-Pose & Gill,2003). It is a practically quasi-federal state (Bastida et al.,2019), where its autonomous communities have great political autonomy (Fernández & Lago,2013) by managing very important areas such as Education, Health, or Social Services (Fernández-Llera & Morán-Méndez,2013). The autonomous communities’ unquestionable relevance, together with their sufficient size for human and financial purposes that would allow them to implement projects such as open government data made us choose the Spanish autonomous communities as the study’s object. This area has been seldom analyzed in terms of economic-financial disclosure (Rodríguez et al.,2013). The fieldwork began in December 2023 with the collection of the open data that the autonomous communities were disclosing (Table 1). Each autonomous community’s portal was visited (with the exception of the Principality of Asturias, which prefers to syndicate its content in the national portal). Table 1. Dataset offerings 2023. Autonomous Community Portal Name Datasets Andalusia Datos Abiertos 692 Aragon Aragón Open Data 2703 Canary Islands Datos Abiertos Canarias 13,646 Cantabria Icane—datos (versión beta) 290 Castilla and Leon Datos Abiertos de Castilla y León 745 Castilla-La Mancha Datos abiertos de Castilla-La Mancha 341 Catalonia Datos Abiertos GenCat 1207 Community of Madrid Comunidad de Madrid datos abiertos 244 Autonomous Community of Navarra Open Data 1533 Valencian Community Dades obertes gva 1427 Extremadura Gobierno Abierto—Catálogo de datos 13 Galicia abert@s 512 Balearic Dades obertes caib 453 La Rioja Datos Abiertos Rioja 839 Basque Country Opendataeuskadi 10,908 Principality of Asturias Open Data del Principado de Asturias 1788 Region of Murcia Datos abiertos Región de Murcia 959 TOTALS 38,300 Of all these data, we have tried to select those associated with transparency, which could consist, according to Kopits and Craig (1998), of all information on the structure and functions of government, public sector projections and accounts, and fiscal policy intentions. In Spain, the common framework is established by Law 19/2013 with three categories: institutional, organizational, and planning information; information of legal relevance; and economic, budgetary, and statistical information (Sierra-Rodríguez,2019). For this purpose, we have reviewed articles 5 to 11 belonging to Chapter II of the National Law (active transparency), selecting, for the first block of our checklist related Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 7 of 19 to accounting and economic-financial information, what is proposed by the following paragraphs of Article 8: “Article 8.d. The budgets, with a description of the main budget items and updated and comprehensible information on their state of execution and on compliance with the objectives of budgetary stability and financial sustainability of the public administrations”. “Article 8.3. The annual accounts to be rendered and the reports on the auditing of accounts and audits by the external control bodies issued thereon. . .” Regarding the second block, which deals with the active transparency of those in power, the articles considered were: “Article 8.f. The remuneration received annually by senior officials and top managers of the entities included in the scope of application of this title. Likewise, the compensation received, if any, on leaving office shall be made public”. “Article 8.h. The annual declarations of assets and activities. . .” Finally, the third block will be inspired by the following articles: “Article 8.a. All contracts, indicating the object, duration, the amount of the tender and award, the procedure used for its conclusion, the instruments through which, if applicable, it has been advertised, the number of bidders participating in the procedure and the identity of the successful bidder, as well as the modifications to the contract. . .” “Article 8.c. The subsidies and public aid granted with an indication of their amount, objective or purpose and beneficiaries”. With the joint consideration of three blocks, our twenty-item checklist (Table 2) is defined. Table 2. Checklist. BLOCK 1. Active Transparency in Accounting and Economic-Financial Information. Related to the budget of expenses and revenues: 1. By any classification (organic, functional, or economic) 2. By breakdown of budget items 3. Report with a description of the budgetary programs Concerning the execution of the budgets: 4. Monthly execution information 5. Annual liquidation 6. Budget modifications Other economic and financial information: 7. Budgets of public entities, companies, and foundations. 8. Annual accounts of public companies 9. General Account of the Autonomous Community 10. Compliance with the budget stability objective 11. Level and breakdown of indebtedness 12. Audit report by an external audit body BLOCK 2. Active Transparency of government officials 13. Organization chart and contact 14. Remuneration of members of the government and senior management. 15. Declarations of assets of members of the government 16. Declarations of activities of members of the government 17. List and remuneration of positions of trust BLOCK 3. Active Transparency in the destination of expenditures 18. Grants and subsidies 19. Scholarships, prizes, or competitions 20. Contracts awarded However, we cannot be satisfied with the fact that the information simply “exists”. We must demand quality, usability, and accessibility parameters from this online information Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 8 of 19 so that citizens can find it, review it, analyze it, and, if necessary, reuse it (Martínez,2015; Cerrillo-Martínez,2018). In this sense, we should mention the work of the Sunlight Foundation and its guidelines for open data policies. The eight principles of open government data were forged in terms of quality and reusable data (Sunlight Foundation,2007): complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, and unlicensed. At least three of these aspects are related to the file format, i.e., how the information contained in the digital file has been encoded: non-proprietary, i.e., available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control and can add restrictions on its use; machineprocessable, the data must be reasonably structured to be automatically processable and, finally, accessible, the data must be available for the widest range of users and purposes (in terms of the breadth of formats to be offered). This file format is at the heart of the five-star open data (Berners-Lee,2010), whose qualification focuses on the technical aspect of open data. It classifies formats into five levels according to their openness and reusability (Table 3). Table 3. Scale 5 stars open data. ⋆ The information is on the web (in any unstructured format). This implies that extra techniques or effort are required to use the data. Examples are image, video, or music formats, as well as PDFs. ⋆⋆ The data are published in structured (machine-readable) formats, which facilitates their processing; however, they are in a proprietary format, which may require the purchase of a license to work with the information. Example: XLS (Microsoft Excel). ⋆⋆⋆ The data are published on the web in a structured format, and they are open and non-proprietary. Anyone can easily access and use the data. An example is CSV. ⋆⋆⋆⋆ The use of URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) allows users to reuse parts of the data and link it to any other data. The data are already “on the web” and will acquire meaning depending on the tags used to create the document. ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆ Linked data level: The original data are linked, using URIs, to new data from other providers. This data linking provides the original data with a new context. Source: Berners-Lee (2010). As Table 3shows, the PDF format frequently used in transparency portals is assigned to the lowest step because it requires additional effort and processing to be incorporated into databases (Ballester,2015), an effort that would be unnecessary if its format were structured (A. García,2013). Based on the checklist (Table 2) and the openness of the information (Table 3), we are in a position to formulate our active transparency indicator specifically. This tool will attribute one point for completing each item with complete and updated information and an additional point for each of the first four levels according to the five-star data scale, depending on the format. Thus, the maximum score would be set at 100 points for completing the 20 sections of the checklist with semantic web levels (four or five stars). The application of this indicator to the fieldwork consisting of the review of the 38,300 datasets indicated in Table 1allowed us to obtain the results shown below. 3. Results This section begins by showing the items addressed for those autonomous regions that have achieved a positive score in at least one of the study’s sections. It then details the number of formats in which the information was available (the digit accompanying the x) and the level five star data (the number in parentheses). Adm. Sci. 2025,15, 80 15 of 19 With respect to foresight, we are aware that the Spanish autonomous communities are very different from one another in terms of surface area, population, income level, and historical, linguistic, and cultural identity. The differences observed between autonomous regions do not seem to respond to general questions of the type, geographic location, population, etc.; therefore, a future line of research could deal with the real determinants that justify the differences found. The political aspect is of great interest since it is one of the most relevant factors (and the one most studied in the literature). Therefore, key issues such as the ideology of the ruling party, the fact of having an absolute majority, the nationalist or regionalist character of the ruling party, the degree of citizen participation in elections, political strength, or having been re-elected could be addressed to give support to previous research conducted in Spain, such as those of García-García and Curto-Rodríguez (2018), whose results show that absolute majority and political strength are associated with lower levels of transparency. Author Contributions: Conceptualization, R.C.-R. and R.M.-S.; methodology, R.C.-R.; software, R.C.- R., R.M.-S. and D.F.; validation, R.C.-R.; formal analysis, R.C.-R. and R.M.-S.; investigation, R.C.-R. and R.M.-S.; resources, R.C.-R. and R.M.-S.; data curation, R.C.-R. and R.M.-S.; writing—original draft preparation, R.C.-R. and R.M.-S.; writing—review and editing, R.M.-S. and D.F.; visualization, R.C.-R., R.M.-S. and D.F.; supervision, R.M.-S. and D.F.; project administration, R.C.-R., R.M.-S. and D.F.; funding acquisition, D.F. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Funding: This research received no external funding. Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable. Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable. Data Availability Statement: Data are contained within the article. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest. References Abascal, E., & Grande, I. (2007). 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