Nordic Openness in Practice: Loose Coupling of Government Communication and Policy-making in Finland
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Abstract Due to the tradition of ‘Nordic openness’, and intensified by international trends, the norm of policy-making transparency is strong in Finland. Inspired by organizational institutionalism, the present article studies what this notion of transparency means in practice. A case study of a social security reform committee is presented. The consensus-building practices typical of Finnish corporatist policy-making significantly constrained the transparency of government communication during the lifetime of the committee. The government communicated actively in public to meet the demand for transparency; but in order to secure effective bargaining, the government communicated issues concerning the committee so vaguely that it did not inspire wide public discussion. Public discussion was instead mainly fuelled by leaks. These findings suggest that a strong norm of transparency can lead to ceremonial transparency, where government public communication is loosely coupled with policy-making practices. These ceremonies might strengthen the notion of Nordic openness.
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The Nordic countries have high levels of openness.
“In addition to transparency, the Nordic countries have high levels of openness [52].”
From Trust, transparency, and openness: How inclusion of cultural values shapes Nordic national public policy strategies for artificial intelligence (AI) (2020) · cites this paper as [52]
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- Authors
- Vesa, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Helsinki (FI)
- Corresponding author
- Vesa, Juho
- ORCID
- Vesa, Juho
- Venue
- Nordicom Review
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published
- 2015-10-01
- Volume
- 36
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 129-142
- ISSN
- 1403-1108 (ISSN-L)
- 2001-5119
- OpenAlex
- W2264108506
- Cited by
- 9
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2024: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 0.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nordicom review/NORDICOM review (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Gothenburg University Publications Electronic Archive (Gothenburg University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Academy of Finland
- Koneen Säätiö
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Public Policy and Administration Research
- Social Sciences › Communication › Media Studies and Communication
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Public Administration and Political Analysis
- Keywords
- government-public communication, social security reform, corporatism, consensus building, leakage, organizational institutionalism, Finland
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