Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Public organizations are under increasing pressure to use data to motivate, inform, and shape their policy- and decision-making. At the same time that public organizations are expected to collect and use more data, they face additional pressure to disclose those data to the public under the auspice of transparency and accountability. Open data is both a policy and technological response to these pressures. They are a combination of policies that require departments to make their data publically available, and technology that centralizes and facilitates public access. Open data differs from previous transparency-oriented policies, and those differences make it useful in innovative ways. What makes open data unique is that it takes previously restricted data and makes it available in a format that is free, ready to use, and platform independent. This sets the stage for the public to engage with data to produce information about government activities and the state of the world. Traditionally, the ability to generate information from government data has been largely the purview of public managers and administrators due to legal and institutional barriers to public access. Public use of government data is not without precedent; examples range from the federal census to city permitting data. But open data standardizes, codifies, and most importantly broadly expands the range of data available for public use, while lowering both fiscal and transactions costs associated with access. Open data has the potential to greatly improve data availability, but as previous research on technology innovation in the public sector has shown, this potential may not be realized in practice (Jun & Weare, 2010; J. Musso, Weare, & Hale, 2000; J. A. Musso & Weare, 2005; Norris & Reddick, 2013).

This paper critically examines the phenomenon of open data adoption by local governments. It draws from the literature on public management, coproduction, and contracting to argue that open data represents a new institutional arrangement for government-public interactions and service delivery that presents both opportunities and threats to public organizations. It contextualizes open data within existing theory to identify its potential motivating benefits as well as its risks. These are then empirically tested using content analysis of local government’s revealed preferences in the form of ordinances and policies announcing and establishing open data policies, as well as administrative and demographic characteristics, for all US cities with 100,000 or more residents. Open data’s principal benefits include improving performance management programs; increasing transparency with the public; promoting economic development; and facilitating innovative digital service delivery in the form of smartphone and other mobile applications. Its potential risks include a loss of control over data use and the resulting potential for data misuse; and privileging private sector technocratic elites. Left unchecked, these risks are theorized to lead to an undersupply of data that are not of use for local economic development. The paper concludes by arguing for strategies public managers can employ when implementing open data to mitigate these risks and ensure that a broad, useful range of data are made available for public use.