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	Bureaucratic Reputation Analysis	Transparency Index
Field	Public Administration	Public Administration
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	2006
Originator	Daniel P. Carpenter	Transparency International / International Budget Partnership
Type	Theoretical analytical framework	Composite governance index
Seminal source	Carpenter, D. P. (2001). The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691070100	Transparency International. Anti-corruption and transparency measurement resources. Transparency International, Berlin.
Aliases	Agency Reputation Analysis, Reputational Theory of Bureaucracy, Organizational Reputation Analysis, Carpenter Reputation Framework	Government Transparency Index, Openness Index, Fiscal Transparency Index, Disclosure Index
Related	4	4
Summary	Bureaucratic reputation analysis is an analytical framework for explaining the behaviour, power and autonomy of public agencies through the lens of their reputation — the set of symbolic beliefs about an agency's capacities, intentions and history held by its many audiences. Developed by Daniel Carpenter, notably in his 2001 study of how U.S. executive agencies forged autonomy, and elaborated with George Krause, the framework treats reputation as a strategic asset that agencies cultivate and protect. It distinguishes performative, moral, technical and procedural dimensions of reputation and traces how reputational concerns drive what agencies do.	A transparency index is a composite measure that scores how openly a government discloses its decisions, finances and operations to citizens. By coding observable indicators — whether budget documents are published, whether access-to-information laws exist and are honoured, whether procurement and asset declarations are public — and aggregating them into a single normalised score, the index makes an abstract governance value comparable across jurisdictions and over time. Prominent operational examples include Transparency International's body of openness measures and the International Budget Partnership's Open Budget Index. Such indices anchor advocacy, conditionality and reform monitoring.