As the Question, So the Answer? Explaining Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Citizen Requests

Abstract

Worldwide, increasing public pleas for freedom of information led more and more countries into committing to access-to-information (ATI) laws. These regulations oblige public officials to provide answers to citizen requests and thus grant citizens with the right to demand public information and gain insight into government data and processes. Yet, even though authorities are obliged to disclose upon request, not all citizen information requests are treated with equal bureaucratic attention. This study focuses on this sort of administrative discrimination and aims at examining potential determinants for varieties of bureaucratic responsiveness to citizen information requests. By drawing on a citizen-driven model of public responsiveness, we want to shed light on the exchange of information in the frame of citi-zen-state interaction and the human aspect behind these processes. Particularly, we argue that the topic citizens ask for as well as the way in which they communicate their requests may influence the corresponding authority’s response. Results from applying text mining and regression techniques to over 150,000 citizen information requests from a German online ATI-platform support our hypotheses. Bureaucratic responsiveness is associated with the specific topic asked for and the way in which the communication tone of the request is for-mulated.