Public budgets and open data: an inescapable democratic requirement

One of the culminating moments of public activity throughout each year is the processing and approval of the respective budgets in the scope of the State, the Autonomous Regions or the Local Authorities. It was precisely in the origin of the representative chambers that the need lay for kings to have only the income authorized by them, thus limiting their tax collection ability and, therefore, expenditure. Seen against this background, a deep link can be said to exist in our current political model between the approval of public accounts and the democratic nature of the decisions concerning income and expenditure to be adopted by the parliamentary representation of the citizenship.

Only a few days ago, the Government referred to Parliament the corresponding State Budget bill for 2017. This is a document composed of several hundred pages of text divided into articles and annexes, which, however, must be completed with multiple memoranda and reports the extent and complexity of which are quite remarkable. The parliamentary proceedings for this project are giving rise to an intense parliamentary debate with many interventions and various procedures, to follow which is undoubtedly very difficult to accept - and understand - for people at large.

The government usually provides a brief summary regarding the budget when it approves the bill and there is also outstanding transparency in the processing phase of the legislative initiative. But often, data is incorporated into structured documents - usually in pdf format- or, when offered in reusable formats, it is limited to the initial version approved by the Executive. As a result, the version finally approved by the Parliament is not usually available according to open data standards and, what without doubt would be more relevant, the information related to budget execution in its various cycles and phases is not accessible in accordance with said requirements either. So that any advanced service it is intended to promote regarding the real state of public expenditure based on budget forecasts - either by political groups, by the economic-financial control bodies or, especially according to what now interests us, by civil society - is all but unfeasible.

The technological tools currently available would undoubtedly reinforce control over the decisions taken by the public authorities, both in terms of approval and, in particular, budget execution, providing instruments of great utility for the public when it comes to knowing and, therefore, controlling the use made of public funds and the way in which economic-budgetary decisions are made. However, transparency according to traditional formats is simply a first step in the democratic opening-up of public institutions, which is undoubtedly important and necessary, but clearly insufficient in that it only operates unilaterally, that is, in one direction, since it does not facilitate the level of control that technology would allow today from the point of view of collaboration; a dimension of Open Government that is usually overlooked and even belittled. But if we really wish to push for a profoundly democratic paradigm shift, transparency must be based on a technological innovation that fosters not only participation but also the active collaboration of social agents, and above all requires the publication of all the information - in its various phases, which must include budget execution - according to the standards of open data, so that society can autonomously generate its own mechanisms for control and participation.

So far, it has been argued that the actors involved and experienced in participation lack legislative powers, whereas those who do hold these powers lack a real incentive to encourage participation. However, at the current stage of technological evolution there are tools that could enable social agents to articulate their own control instruments through the development of new applications and services or simply the refinement of some already existing ones. Although this approach - especially if it can be turned into an example of "uncoordinated cooperation" - would allow a huge qualitative leap in the control of the planning and use of public funds, the inexcusable premise is to move from mere unidirectional transparency to one that is more technologically advanced, which ultimately would also be more democratic. And for this, economic-budgetary information, in its various manifestations and phases, must necessarily be accessible in the open data format.