Do institutional pressures increase reactive transparency of government? Evidence from a field experiment

ABSTRACT

This study aims to contribute to the literature on government reactive transparency based on the new institutional theory by testing the influences of regulative pressure and mimetic pressure on government compliance with information requests from the public. Through a randomized field experiment, requests were sent to 198 subdistrict governments in Shanghai, China, with the textual records of the requesting process and follow-up interviews. The findings confirm that regulative pressure can increase government compliance with requests. Further, governments prefer to use three strategies, namely selectivity, bargaining, and avoidance, as alternatives to conformity to institutional pressures for transparency.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional pressures
• reactive transparency
• field experiment
• information requests

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2022.2058597.

Notes

1. Preregistration is generally beneficial to increasing the credibility of published results (Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2019). We registered our experiment with the Open Science Framework (OSF) Registries on 12 December 2021 after analysing the outcome data. The registration information can be found at https://osf.io/v38c9.

2. Given the inevitable interactions between government officials and the requester during the requesting process, our study set general criteria to prevent the requester’s behaviour from influencing the outcome. The requester took no further action if governments put forward any demand outside FOI regulations, such as asking for a face-to-face meeting.

3. This study used G*Power 3.1 to conduct a power analysis to estimate the achieved power of our samples (Faul et al. 2009). We set a given sample of 198, a significance level of 0.05, and a medium effect size of 0.25. The result indicated that our samples had a power of 0.888 to detect the treatment effects, which is higher than the minimum threshold of 0.80 (Cohen 1988).

4. There were 189 information requests sent on 23 June 2019. Information requests to the other nine subdistricts – of J district – were sent on 26 June 2019 because their websites were not functional.

5. According to the law of local organizations in China, a committee office is regarded as a branch of the district governments. In contrast, a town comprises a level of local administrative units (National People’s Congress of China 2015).

6. Given the limited sample size, this study used a minimum power threshold of 0.80 to provide a conservative estimate of the effect size (Cohen 1988).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wenting Yang

Wenting Yang is a PhD Candidate at the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests include government transparency, digital governance, and performance management.

Chuanshen Qin

Chuanshen Qin, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research includes risk governance, emergency management, and policy evaluation.

Bo Fan

Bo Fan, PhD, is a Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include e-government, digital governance, and emergency management.