Regional emulation and the design of transparency policies

1\. Introduction 5 2\. The Global Spread of the Freedom of Information 7 3\. The Diffusion of Policy Design 9 3.1 Uncertainty and Emulation 9 3.2 Illustrative Evidence 10 4\. A Quantitative Approach to Policy Design and Policy Similarity 14 4.1 Measuring the Design of FOI Laws 14 4.2 Modeling Policy Similarity among Country-Pairs 15 5\. Model Results 17 5.1 Regional Emulation 17 5.2 Alternative Diffusion Mechanisms 18 6\. Conclusion 23 Bibliography 25How do countries make policy in an uncertain world? Do policymakers look inward, rationally designing policies to fit domestic interests, ideas, and institutions? Or do they look outward, imitating policy elements from other countries? And if the latter, where do they look? Focusing on the specific policy area of Freedom of Information laws, I argue that regional emulation plays an important role in shaping policy design. Policymakers face substantial uncertainty over the consequences of different design choices, and so emulate other countries as policy models. I further argue that, due to availability bias, countries in the same region serve as the most important such models. After reviewing numerous examples of such emulation, I model the policy similarity between 4,096 pairs of countries, and find that countries in the same region, or more geographically proximate, tend to have more similar laws than other country-pairs. These results are robust to different categorizations of region, fixed effects capturing country-specific features, and testing against alternative forms of emulation as well as alternative diffusion mechanisms of competition, coercion, conditionality, and learning. This approach also highlights the diffusion of policy design, as opposed to adoption, as an important future direction for policy diffusion research

Partisan context and procedural values: attitudes towards presidential secrecy before and after the 2016 US election

What shapes attitudes towards procedural rules that constrain executive power? This letter argues that procedural values are contextual: A function of who is in power. Supporters of those in power prefer fewer procedural constraints, while opposition supporters prefer greater. This study reports the results of a unique test using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. Respondents were asked, in both pre- and post-election waves, if they thought it should be ‘easier or harder for the president to keep documents secret from the public’. The panel design makes it possible to track individual changes following the shift in political context. The results show evidence of a partisan ‘flip’ in attitudes following the election, with Republicans becoming less likely – and Democrats more likely – to prefer additional constraints on presidential secrecy. However, this partisan ‘flip’ is present only among higher political knowledge respondents

Follow your Neighbor?: Regional Emulation and the Design of Transparency Policies

How do countries make policy in an uncertain world? Do policymakers look inward, rationally designing policies to fit domestic interests, ideas, and institutions? Or do they look outward, imitating policy elements from other countries? And if the latter, where do they look? Focusing on the specific policy area of Freedom of Information laws, I argue that regional emulation plays an important role in shaping policy design. Policymakers face substantial uncertainty over the consequences of different design choices, and so emulate other countries as policy models. I further argue that, due to availability bias, countries in thesame region serve as the most important such models. After reviewing numerous examples of such emulation, I model the policy similarity between 4,096 pairs of countries, and find that countries in the same region, or more geographically proximate, tend to have more similar laws than other country-pairs. These results are robust to different categorizations of region, fixed effects capturing country-specific features, and testing against alternative forms of emulation as well as alternative diffusion mechanisms of competition, coercion, conditionality, and learning. This approach also highlights the diffusion of policy design, as opposed to adoption, as an important future direction for policy diffusion research

Do voters differentially punish transnational corruption?

A large literature studies whether, and under what circumstances, voters will electorally punish corrupt politicians. Yet this literature has to date neglected the empirical prevalence of transnational dimensions to real-world corruption allegations, even as corruption studies undergo a ‘transnational turn’. We use a survey experiment in the United Kingdom in 2020 to investigate whether voters differentially punish politicians associated with transnational corruption and test four different potential mechanisms: information salience, country-based discrimination, economic nationalism and expected representation. We find evidence suggesting that voters indeed differentially punish transnational corruption, but only when it involves countries perceived negatively by the public (i.e. a ‘Moscow-based firm’). This is most consistent with a mechanism of country-based discrimination, while we find no evidence consistent with any other mechanism. These results suggest that existing experimental studies might understate the potential for electoral accountability by neglecting real-world corruption allegations’ frequent transnational dimension

Process effects of multistakeholder institutions: theory and evidence from the Open Government Partnership

How does membership in transnational multistakeholder institutions shape states' domestic governance? We complement traditional compliance-based approaches by developing a process model, focusing on the independent effects of processes associated with institutional membership, but separate from commitments and compliance themselves. These effects can be driven by iterative and participatory institutional features, which are increasingly prevalent in global governance. We apply this model to the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a transnational multistakeholder initiative with nearly 80 member countries, featuring highly flexible commitments and weak enforcement. Although commitments and compliance have generally been limited, a compliance-focused approach alone cannot account for myriad other consequences globally and domestically, driven by the iterative and participatory features associated with membership. We demonstrate these at work in a case study of Mexico's OGP membership, which contributed to the spread of new norms and policy models, new political resources and opportunities for reformers, and new linkages and coalitions

Learning from our mistakes: public management reform and the hope of open government

In public administration today, many new reform ideas mingle, offering new diagnoses of governmental problems and courses of action. But scholars have highlighted reasons why we should doubt the optimistic claims of reformists. A new set of policy tools called "open government"arrived nearly a decade ago, and scholars have not yet explained its origins or prospects as specific approach to management reform. In this article, we address this lacuna. We compare open government with three other historic reforms, and analyze how likely its ideas are to bear fruit. In so doing, we introduce a framework for evaluating risks inherent in any new reform approach. We conclude that the challenges faced by open government are both new and old, but - like all reform approaches - they result from management challenges in reconciling competing interests and values that raise tensions and can lead to unexpected consequences. We argue that these will need careful attention if the open government approach is to have any hope of succeeding

How to ensure governments stay on track to meet the 1.5°C target

The recent “global stocktake” report, discussing where the world stands on climate action, shows conclusively that governments are not on track to meet international temperature goals, while adaptation and finance actions are also lagging. Critics of the stocktake process have been sceptical about its ability to catalyse sufficiently greater ambition – but it may yet produce positive outcomes, even where policy and implementation gaps remain, argue Daniel Berliner, Ian Higham and Joana Setzer

When does open government shut? Predicting government responses to citizen information requests

Methods for the analysis of “big data” on citizen-government interactions are necessary for theoretical assessments of bureaucratic responsiveness. Such big data methods also stand to benefit practitioners' abilities to monitor and improve these emerging transparency mechanisms. We consider supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) as a potential method for these purposes. To this end, we use sLDA to examine the Mexican government's (non)responsiveness to all public information requests filed with the federal Mexican government during the 2003–2015 period, and to identify the request topics most associated with (non)responsiveness. Substantively, our comparisons of the topics that are most highly predictive of responsiveness and nonresponsivess indicate that political sensitivity plays a large and important role in shaping official behavior in this arena. We thus conclude that sLDA provides unique advantages for, and insights into, the analysis of (i) textual records of citizen–government interactions and (ii) bureaucratic (non)responsiveness to these interactions

What information do citizens want? Evidence from one million information requests in Mexico

While scholars have emphasized the importance of information for accountability, little research has addressed the demand for government information by real citizens. We study the totality of information requests filed with Mexican federal government agencies from 2003 to 2015, over 1 million requests in all. We use unsupervised methods to categorize requests, revealing the diversity of topics including environment, security, budgets, and government procurement and employees. While many topics have clear public accountability-seeking purposes, others are focused on more private, micro-political goals. Analysis over time and across states reveals linkage between information demand and issues of public interest such as environmental impacts and criminal violence. Our results demonstrate that, given functioning access-to-information institutions, citizens in a transitional democracy really do demand information relevant to public accountability