Transparency and trust in government (2007-2014): a comparative study

In a 2000 report entitled "Trust in government. Ethics measures in OECD countries," OECD Secretary-General Donald J. Johnston emphasized the fact that public ethics are considered as a keystone of good governance. Moreover, public ethics are a prerequisite to public trust, which is in turn vital not only to any public service, but also to any society in general. At the same time, transparency reforms have flourished over the last few years and have several times been designed as a response to public distrust. Therefore, ethics, transparency and trust are closely linked together in a supposed virtuous circle where transparency works as a factor of better public ethics and leads to more trust in government on the citizens' side. This article explores the links between transparency and levels of trust in 10 countries between 2007 and 2014, using open data indexes and access to information requests as proxies for transparency. A national ranking of transparency, based on requests submitted by citizens to the administration and open data indexes, is then proposed. Key findings show that there is no sharp decline of trust in government in all countries considered in this article, and that transparency and trust in government are not systematically positively associated. Therefore, this article challenges the common assumption, mostly found in the normative literature, about a positive interrelation between the two, where trust in government is conceived as a beneficial effect of administrative transparency.

Des relations déraisonnables ? Marie Bonaparte, son chien Topsy, la biologie et la psychanalyse

Analysée par Sigmund Freud, Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962) devint son élève et eu un rôle capital dans le développement de la psychanalyse en France. Elle fut aussi une proche de Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), passionnée comme lui par les sciences et fréquenta notamment les scientifiques de L'Institut Pasteur. Outre son oeuvre de psychanalyste, elle publia en 1937 un texte sur le cancer de sa chienne Topsy qui sera traduit en allemand par Freud et connaitra un réel succès éditorial. L'analyse de cet ouvrage met à jour non seulement les spécificités de son rapport à l'animal mais aussi celui qu'elle entretient avec la science.

Is Transnational Private Regulation Potentially an Effective Means of Promoting Collective Industrial Relations?

This paper asks whether collective industrial relations can be promoted by means other than seeking change in public policy. Recent research points to the increasing significance of transnational private regulation (TPR) in developing economies. There is an emerging consensus that market incentives to improve wages and conditions of work can have a modest positive effect on measurable outcomes like hours of work, and health and safety. However, it appears that TPR has little impact on the capacity of workers to pursue such improvements for themselves via collective action. The paper takes a closer look at the potential of TPR to enhance worker voice and participation. It argues that this potential cannot be properly evaluated without understanding how local actors mobilise the social and political resources that TPR provides. The case studies presented show how different TPR schemes have been used by unions in Africa as a means to pursue the interests of members. The authors found that the scale of the impact of TPR in all of the contexts studied depended almost entirely on the existing capacities and resources of the unions involved. TPR led to the creation of collective industrial relations processes, or helped unions to ensure that certain enterprises participated in existing industrial relations processes, but did virtually nothing to enhance the political and organisational capacity of the unions to influence the outcomes of those processes in terms of wages and conditions of employment. The paper concludes that the potential of TPR to promote the emergence of collective industrial relations systems is very low.