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It is possible to trace back the concept and practice of government transparency for more than 250 years (Meijer, 2015). Unsurprisingly, there is by now an extensive body of literature on the topic (Cucciniello et al., 2017) which include an abundance of transparency definitions (Bannister & Connolly, 2011), complemented by different dichotomies, categorizations, and varieties of transparency (Fung, 2013; Heald, 2006). A common characteristic of the many transparency definitions is that they encompass three elements: an observer, an object and a method for observation (Oliver, 2004).
Citizens are usually considered the observer seeking to access information about public administration organizations’ internal workings. The goal is to “open up the working procedures not immediately visible to those not directly involved to demonstrate the good working of an institution” (Moser, 2001, p. 3) or, more specifically, to foster “the disclosure of information by an organization that enables external actors to monitor and assess its internal workings and performance” (Grimmelikhuijsen & Welch, 2012, p. 2).
The object of transparency may be an organization as a whole, a specific object or a specific activity (Cucciniello et al., 2017), such as policy-making processes and activities (Brunswicker et al., 2019), budgetary information (Birskyte, 2019) or financial information (Puron-Cid et al., 2019). In this context, assessment studies usually adopt, adapt or create an analysis framework which establishes a set of (information) items that should be available online (Lourenço, 2015) and use the framework to assess the degree of online transparency.
Regarding the means or method to disclose information, information and communication technologies (ICTs) became an important driver of transparency (Bertot et al., 2012; Meijer, 2015). The Internet, in particular, has had such an impact on (traditional) transparency that the term e-transparency was coined (Bannister & Connolly, 2011), and government transparency often became “equaled to information on a government Web site” (Meijer, 2015). As a consequence, there has been a push for more open government data to be released (Nikiforova & McBride, 2020), with a positive impact on eGovernment services adoption (Mensah et al., 2021), alongside other factors influencing adoption (Alryalat et al., 2015; Mensah et al., 2022; Rana et al., 2012, 2015, 2017; Rana & Dwivedi, 2015).
This article addresses the transparency of public digital services (eServices) or e-government services. While eGovernment may be broadly defined as “the use and application of information technologies in public administration to streamline and integrate workflows and processes, to effectively manage data and information, enhance public service delivery, as well as expand communication channels for engagement and empowerment of people” (United Nations, 2014, p. 2), examples of such services include online income tax filing, goods and services tax filing, or passport application filing (Sharma et al., 2021). And while providing these online services usually relies on websites and portals, nowadays different technologies are being used, such as mobile technology (mGovernment) and social media (Al Najjar et al., 2019; Alryalat et al., 2017; Hebbar & Kiran, 2019, 2022).
From a citizen (service user) perspective, digital services may become a kind of black box: once a service is initiated there may be no way to see what is happening inside it and all that remains is to wait for its completion (Sabucedo et al., 2009). In a nutshell, eServices transparency simply means citizens can look inside the service black box.