Nordic Openness in Practice

Vesa, Juho
Wadbring, Ingela
Nordicomsv
2015-10-23T10:54:13Z
2015-10-23T10:54:13Z
2015-10-21
Due to the tradition of ‘Nordic openness’, and intensified by international trends, the norm of policy-making transparency is strong in Finland. Inspired by organizational institutionalism, the present article studies what this notion of transparency means in practice. A case study of a social security reform committee is presented. The consensus-building practices typical of Finnish corporatist policy-making significantly constrained the transparency of government communication during the lifetime of the committee. The government communicated actively in public to meet the demand for transparency; but in order to secure effective bargaining, the government communicated issues concerning the committee so vaguely that it did not inspire wide public discussion. Public discussion was instead mainly fuelled by leaks. These findings suggest that a strong norm of transparency can lead to ceremonial transparency, where government public communication is loosely coupled with policy-making practices. These ceremonies might strengthen the notion of Nordic openness.sv
13sv
Nordicom Review 36 (2015) 2, pp. 129-142sv
978-91-87957-18-5
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/40864
engsv
Nordic Council of Ministers, Nordicomsv
Nordicom Reviewsv
2015 no 2 vol 36sv
DOI: 10.1515/nor-2015-0021sv
Nordic opennesssv
government communicationsv
policy-makingsv
corporatismsv
Nordic Openness in Practicesv
Loose Coupling of Government Communicationsv
Textsv
article, peer reviewed scientificsv

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