Do Freedom of Information Laws Increase Transparency of Government? A replication of a field experiment

Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws – the legal backbone for such value – actually help to increase them? This paper reports a close replication of... [ view full abstract ]

Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws – the legal backbone for such value – actually help to increase them? This paper reports a close replication of a field experiment in the UK. We sent out 390 information requests to Dutch local governments, half of which were framed as official FOIA requests, the other half as informal asks for information. We were able to reproduce the original findings, that is, we found a positive effect of FOIA requests on responsiveness and proactive disclosure. Interestingly, the overall response rate of local governments was high (76%) and the size of the effect was larger than in the original experiment. Implications and limitations of this replication study are discussed.