Transparency talk among candidates for public office

How common are invocations and promises of transparency and open government among candidates for municipal office? What factors drive ‘transparency talk’, and does this ‘talk’ translate into the ‘walk’ of transparency policy enactment? This study presents an inaugural mapping and descriptive analysis of transparency talk. Drawing on nearly 40,000 pledges from mayoral candidates across Brazil’s 5,571 municipalities, we analyse the effect of demographic, socioeconomic, and individual-level candidate variables on transparency talk. Our findings confirm many of the canonical findings on municipal transparency performance (e.g. the positive effect of larger municipalities), but also suggest that transparency talk: a) translates into the walk of policy enactment among elected candidates, b) is more common among younger candidates and well-educated females, and, c) has evolved from more generic talk (e.g. ‘transparency’) to more policy-specific language (e.g. access to information), even as specific language has grown at a slower pace.