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powers for personal gain. Insofar as opening up government shows that public officials are conducting their activities fairly, it should encourage citizens to trust their political institutions. However, if transparency confirms popular perceptions of widespread corruption, it can increase distrust. Like any concept that has positive associations, the meaning of transparency can be stretched to cover almost any feature of government. Because it is an abstraction, transparency or its absence has become an integral part of many syndromes of governance, good or bad (Johnston 2005). The definition by Bauhr and Grimes (2012: 5) is broad and general. Transparency is a condition in which both political outsiders and insiders can access information about public policy, evaluate it in terms of conformity to public standards and by the outcomes it produces, and publicize their judgments of how their governors act. The weakening of closed authoritarian regimes has led to a big increase in Freedom of Information (FOI) acts, a necessary requirement for making governance transparent. In 1990 there were only 15 countries with such laws. The number more than doubled in the following decade, and doubled again by 2010. A total of 93 countries around the globe now have FOI acts (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015: 103ff). The demand to make the process of governance more transparent reflects a multiplicity of political pressures. The introduction of democratic institutions such as competing parties and free media encourages civic groups to claim the right to know how they are governed and hold their governors accountable. The exposure of individual policymakers breaking standards in well governed as well as badly governed countries has created pressures for more transparency. Public agencies giving aid to poor countries where capital-intensive corruption is widespread are applying pressure on recipients to be more transparent about where the money goes (Darch and Underwood 2010). The growth of social services has made citizens stakeholders in the delivery of public services, with a claim to know how services are provided. In countries where major media are hesitant to expose government shortcomings, social media create the possibility that news of bad behaviour made available by open governance can rapidly go viral. This puts pressure on prosecutors to open up to scrutiny by public opinion many files that had been closed and, if there is evidence of unlawful behaviour, to take legal action too.
