Do freedom of information laws increase transparency of government? A replication of a field experiment

Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen,Peter John,Albert Meijer,Ben Worthy

doi:10.30636/jbpa.12.34

Abstract

Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws - one of the legal basis for such values - actually help to increase these values? This paper reports a replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities by Worthy et al (2016) in the United Kingdom. We sent 390 information requests to Dutch local government bodies, half of which were framed as official FOIA requests, the other half as informal requests for information. We were able to reproduce the original findings, that is, we found a positive effect of FOIA requests on responsiveness. The overall response rate of local governments was much higher (76%) and the size of the effect was larger than in the original experiment. Furthermore, the strongest effect of FOI was found on proactive disclosure (concordance), something that governments - strictly speaking - are not obliged to do according to the Dutch FOIA. Implications for future replication studies are discussed.

Highlights

Transparency is a core value of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information laws – one of the central legal basis for this value – help increase it? This paper reports a pre-registered replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities to information requests carried out by Worthy et al (2017) in the United Kingdom
A more specific reason for replication is that the Worthy et al (2017) experiment was only conducted in the UK ( England) and we investigate whether these findings extend to a different political and administrative context
When we look at the basic measure for Freedom of Information (FOI) effectiveness, the five-point compliance scale, we find some clear differences between the control and treatment group (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Transparency is a core value of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information laws – one of the central legal basis for this value – help increase it? This paper reports a pre-registered replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities to information requests carried out by Worthy et al (2017) in the United Kingdom. Transparency is a core value of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information laws – one of the central legal basis for this value – help increase it? We were able to reproduce the original findings; that is, we found a positive effect of FOIA requests on responsiveness. The overall response rate of local governments was much higher (76%) and the size of the effect was larger than in the original experiment. Transparency has become a core principle of good governance (Hood & Heald, 2006; Fenster, 2015) and is expected to generate positive outcomes, such as greater accountability, increased trust, and less corruption (Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer, 2014). Grimmelikhuijsen et al, 2019 a ‘moral appeal’ had no effect but framing a request as an ‘official’ FOI request did improve the chances of a response

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