La resistencia a la transparencia en Españael derecho de acceso

Résumé

This doctoral thesis presents an analysis of the right to access information in Spain under the question of how the resistance to the implementation of transparency materializes since the Law 19/2013 on transparency, access to information and good government come into force. To do this, we collected data through access requests resulting in two databases: one for the management of access requests by territorial public administrations at the national level and another for access to information claims before the transparency control bodies for the local, regional and national levels. We propose a series of statistical tests to contrast our hypotheses on the influence of three sets of independent variables on what we have called "performance" of the responses and the average time in which they occur. Among the results, we can highlight the following: the existence of an eminently masculine nature of the applicants at all levels for the right of access, as well as a bias against women’s requests and in the autonomous communities and against requests registered online; the concentration of higher levels of opacity at the local level; a high relevance of “administrative silence” (non-response) as a great weakness of the Spanish system of transparency; and, finally, the clear influence of political and institutional variables in the management of the right of access. Ideology, government configuration and the cycle of the Legislature affect the management of requests for access, and the design of control bodies has influence on their performance responding to claims. Our contributions are relevant because they represent an advance in an unexplored line of research in the field of access rights management, its practical results, since it has been so far dominated almost exclusively by legal analyses focused on norms, while political scientists have been focused on the study of the results of active transparency