Despite the importance of government transparency
to promote accountability and prevent
maladministration, empirical research
has failed to produce proper tools to assess
and compare government transparency practices.
Most contributions to the topic do not
address it from a stakeholder’s perspective,
particularly in selecting the indicators to
include in transparency indexes. This paper
contributes to the debate by developing a
municipal transparency index based on information
available on local government official
websites. The methodological approach borrows
insights from the decision analysis literature
to structure the index through a
participatory process. An application to the
Portuguese local government setting is
briefly discussed.