Ray Fisman (Alesina Seminar)
Date and Time
Location
Speaker & Title
Ray Fisman (Boston University), "Electoral Incentives and Government Transparency: Evidence from Freedom of Information Requests (with Aron Malatinszky and Eyub Yegen)
Abstract
Transparency is a basic requirement of government accountability, allowing citizens access to the information necessary to monitor, reward, and punish politicians and bureaucrats. Yet transparency inevitably involves discretion by the same government that is under evaluation. In this paper, we show that reelection incentives may reduce transparency, by comparing responsiveness of freedom-of-information requests made via the online platform MuckRock before versus after state and municipal elections. Since identical requests are often made simultaneously to many agencies across the U.S., we may assess whether an agency rejects a request while holding constant the timing, submitter, and request content, varying only whether the request is filed shortly before or shortly after an election. We first document that our ``revealed transparency" measure is positively correlated with a standard measure of state-level corruption. Our main analyses then show that revealed transparency in state agencies is lower ahead of state-level elections in high-corruption settings; we observe a similar pattern for municipal agencies ahead of mayoral elections; in contrast, we find the opposite relationship in lower-corruption states. Overall, our results suggest that discretion may be used to limit access to information that is relevant to political accountability.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.