The Use and Management of Public Information in Social Media: A Case Study of Town and City Councils Throughout Andalusia on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube

Introduction

Local authorities constitute the most direct conduit between citizens and public administrations. They are the gateway for most of the requests that citizens make to their political representatives, who in turn have the duty to attend to, manage and process petitions, either within the same town hall or by appealing to other institutions (Bosón, Torres, Royos, & Flores, 2012). In this sense, Campillo Alhama (2011, p. 1036) points out that citizens must be informed and have access to all the information on administrative procedures and actions that may influence their situation. It is based on the idea that transparency is a basic democratic principle and that its role in the public sphere requires that administrations publish and make accessible general information that may be of interest to citizens (Gandía, Marrahí, & Huguet, 2016, p. 29).

This study is framed in a context in which Spain (as is occurring in many other EU countries) is experiencing a growing disaffection with the political class, which is augmented by the lack of a tradition in government transparency which coincides with a growing demand for democracy by the citizens (Villoria, 2014). Given this scenario, a new law regulating transparency, access to public information, and good governance was put on the books in Spain (Ley 19/2013, de 9 de diciembre, de Transparencia, Acceso a la Información Pública y Buen Gobierno). In its preamble, the document enthrones transparency, access to public information and good governance standards as “the fundamental axes of all political action”. Despite this, compliance with the law by administrations has not been uniform and there is still the problem of the lack of facilities for users to access this information in an intelligible way (Beltrán Orenes & Martínez-Pastor, 2016). This law has already had its transposition in almost all the Spanish autonomous communities. In the case of Catalonia, as an empirical result of this implementation, the heads of the Journalism and Communication Laboratory for Plural Citizenship of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (Moreno Sardà, Molina Rodríguez Navas, Corcoy Rius, Aguilar Pérez, & Borrás Farran, 2013) prepared the Infoparticipate Map. The map is an online platform that was developed from 2012 with the purpose of collaborating to remedy the lack of Spanish legislation on transparency. The main objective of this project, which was extended in the first phase to the autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Canary Islands, Madrid, Andalusia, Aragon and Galicia, was to evaluate the information to ensure that public administrations improve their communication practices and offer complete and understandable transparent information, so that citizens can exercise their legitimate rights to democratic control and evaluation of institutions.

Given this scenario, and based on Law 19/2013, cited above, this chapter emerges as a complementary line of research to the one developed by the Catalan Research Group in its R&D&I project entitled: “Methodologies and information models for monitoring the actions of those responsible for local governments and accountability.” The work starts from considering that in today's society, in which technological development is the protagonist, easy access and the correct disposition of online information by local authorities creates a growing need for all citizens. Beyond its presence through web portals, it is considered convenient to pay attention to the use and management of information on social networks as an instrument that allows citizen participation. Thus, the objective is to analyse how the main municipalities of each Andalusian province share public information through these new channels which are presented as a communication and interaction tool between administrations and citizens.