Bruna Ribeiro (University of Minho), Miguel Rodrigues (University of Minho) and Francisca Tejedo-Romero (University of Castilla-La Mancha)

Why do some municipalities open their books, publish their contracts and document their decisions online, while their neighbours – operating under exactly the same legal framework – remain opaque? Freedom of information laws set a floor, but the striking fact about local government transparency is how much variation survives above that floor. If the law were the whole story, all councils would look alike. They do not.

In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we explore one part of the answer that has attracted growing attention across Europe: who leads. Specifically, we ask whether female leadership changes how much information municipalities actively disclose to their citizens — and whether the political context in which women govern conditions that effect.

Why leadership and gender?

The theoretical case is well established. Research across countries has associated women’s political presence with lower tolerance of corruption, different risk preferences, and a stronger orientation towards accountability. Earlier work on Spanish municipalities found that women’s representation in local councils has a positive influence on transparency levels. But representation on the council and leadership of the executive are different things. Mayors set administrative priorities, control the machinery that produces (or withholds) information, and answer personally for what appears on the municipal website. If gender matters for transparency, the mayor’s office is where we would expect it to show.

Portugal offers an unusually good laboratory. Since 2013, the Municipal Transparency Index (MTI), produced by Transparency International Portugal, has scored all 308 municipalities from 0 to 100 on the information they make available through their official websites. This gives us a consistent, externally produced measure of active disclosure, in a system where women remain a small minority of mayors but where the 2006 Parity Law — recently strengthened from a 33% to a 40% candidate quota — has been steadily reshaping who enters local politics.

What we did

We linked each municipal election to the transparency performance of the government it produced: the mayors and councils elected in 2009 and 2013 were matched to the Municipal Transparency Index scores of 2013 and 2017, across all 308 municipalities. This temporal structure ensures that who governs strictly precedes what gets disclosed. We then tested whether the gender of the mayor is associated with transparency — on its own, and in interaction with two features of the political context: whether the mayor governs with an absolute majority, and whether they belong to a left-wing party. The models control for women’s presence in the council, financial autonomy, unemployment, turnout and population, and the results hold when we exclude Lisbon and Porto and under alternative specifications.

What we found

The headline result is not the one either optimists or sceptics might expect. Female mayors, on their own, have no statistically significant effect on municipal transparency. But the average conceals a striking conditional pattern. Without an absolute majority, female mayors are associated with transparency scores roughly 7.5 points lower on the 0–100 index than their male counterparts. Give them an absolute majority, and the association flips: the interaction adds around 10 points, turning the net effect positive — female-led municipalities with strong political backing outperform male-led ones. There is also suggestive (though weaker) evidence that belonging to a left-wing party partially offsets the negative baseline.

In other words, the question “do women govern more transparently?” is badly posed. The better question is: under what conditions can they? Women in Portuguese town halls are still rare — only about 7% of municipalities had a female mayor in the period we study — and those governing without a majority face weak institutional support that appears to hinder the implementation of transparency measures. Political strength provides the stability, resources and authority to translate leadership values into open governance; without it, being a pioneer is mostly an uphill struggle.

Why this matters beyond Portugal

Three implications travel well beyond the Portuguese case.

First, transparency policy is usually designed as if compliance were a purely administrative matter — build the portal, mandate the disclosure, audit the result. Our findings suggest that who is in office, and the political incentives they face, shape how far councils go beyond the legal minimum. Transparency is a political choice dressed up as an administrative one.

Second, the debate on gender quotas and parity laws tends to focus on descriptive representation — how many women get elected. Our evidence suggests that numbers are not enough. The mere presence of women in leadership does not, by itself, deliver more open government; what matters is whether they hold real power to act. Quotas should therefore go beyond numerical representation and be accompanied by the conditions for women to exercise actual influence — party support, resources, and genuine political authority. Putting women in office without power risks setting them up to underperform against expectations the literature itself created.

Third, for practitioners and transparency campaigners, the lesson is about where to aim. If disclosure responds to political context, then rankings and indices like Portugal’s Municipal Transparency Index are not just measurement tools — they are interventions, changing the reputational payoff of openness for the leaders most sensitive to it.

The bigger research picture

This article is part of a wider research agenda at the Research Centre in Political Science (CICP, University of Minho) on gender and local politics in Southern Europe. Companion studies have examined how women break the political glass ceiling at local level (Governance, 2025) and how voters respond to female candidates in local elections (South European Society and Politics, 2026). Together, they trace the full pipeline — from candidacy, through election, to what changes once women actually govern.

The transparency question sits at the end of that pipeline, and it may be the most consequential part: representation matters not only for who sits in the town hall, but for whether citizens can see what happens inside it.

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Bruna Ribeiro recently completed her PhD in Administrative Sciences at the University of Minho (CICP). Miguel Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation at the School of Economics, Management and Political Science, University of Minho. Francisca Tejedo-Romero is based at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Castilla-La Mancha.

The full article, “Transparency in local government: exploring the impact of female leadership and political context”, is available in Local Government Studies: https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2025.2612054