Putting transparency to the test: evaluating FOI in practice
In our latest online webinar, we convened three experts to speak around the topic of how Freedom of Information works in practice – in other words, how does the law work when it comes into contact with the real world?<br>Speakers were:<br><br>Toby Mendel, Centre for Law and Democracy<br>Giovanni Esposito, Université Libre de Bruxelles<br>Mária Žuffová, European University Institute<br><br>Sign up for updates and we’ll let you know when the next events come up. Don’t forget to check the box ‘Conferences and events’ if you want to know about every event we put on, and/or any of the other topics you have an interest in.<br>Music: Grand_Project from Pixabay<br>Image: Nick Fewings<br><br>Transcript<br>Myf Nixon 0:00<br>Hello again. Today we’re sharing our latest online webinar, which was called “Putting transparency to the test: evaluating FOI in practice”.<br>Myf Nixon 0:10<br>So the idea here was to look at how Freedom of Information is supposed to work on paper, and how it actually works when it comes into contact with the real world. (more…)
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Transcript
Hello again. Today, we are sharing our latest online webinar, which was called Putting Transparency to the Test, Evaluating FOI in Practice. So the idea here was to look at how freedom of information is supposed to work on paper, and how it actually works when it comes into contact with the real world. You are about to hear from three really expert speakers. First of all, there was Toby Mendel from the Center for Law and Democracy, and they're an interesting organization who have run the right to information rating since 2011. So this is a kind of ranking of all the countries in the world. You can see at a glance which countries are performing well across all sorts of different indicators around transparency and freedom of information, and which ones are not performing quite so well. And Toby will explain how a ranking can have really interesting effects, which is something that was particularly of interest to us at my society as well when we think about things like our council climate action scorecards, which have had great knock on effects amongst councils hoping to compete to get to the top, and also looking back in time at our right to them ranking in which we used to rank MPs by their responsiveness. After Toby, we hear from Giovanni Esposito from the University of Brussels, and he will be describing a set of field experiments that he conducted in collaboration with transparencia.be, and they are an Alaveteli freedom of information site operating very actively within Belgium. Giovanni's experiments were looking at what factors might make a difference to responsiveness when you put in a request for information. So they asked for the same document from several different municipalities. And you can find out what the results were by listening to this podcast. And then finally, Maria Zafova of the European University Institute shared some research, which was, again, of great interest to us at mySociety, but we think will also be of great interest to anyone with a curiosity about humankind. And this research goes into what The UK public actually want to know, and she based it all on what do they know requests going back for years. So some real analysis going on there and some great insights. Over to the three speakers, and I hope you enjoy listening.
We we launched the RTI rating in 2011. So just, you know, like a year and a half after CLD was founded. It had, to me, been, apparent for quite a long time that we were seeing this massive growth in the number of RTI laws that were, you know, in place and being adopted each year, you know, a bunch of new laws coming on stream. And, you know, as civil society advocates ourselves and others, we're spending quite a lot of time, you know, pushing for stronger laws and advocating around that and things. And the the idea that, you know, a sophisticated, assessment methodology for seeing how strong laws were, would be a, you know, an enormously beneficial tool, in the sense of, first of all, it would be a scientific and standardized and objective, if I can put it that way, way of assessing a law. There are nothing like ratings to inspire countries to move up and push up. You know, over the years of the RTI rating, I have used it endlessly, in that way and sort of say, well, you know, to country in this region, your neighbor over there is, like, six points higher than you. What are you gonna do about that? And and it just it's amazing how how, you know, easy it is in a way to get the policy makers and decision makers to bite on that. Whereas if you just say, oh, we lost weak. You should improve it. That's a lot less convincing for them. So the the the need for this and the benefits of this were, you know, were very, very apparent. To me, I pitched the idea, to Helen Darbyshire at AccessInfo Europe, who of course tragically died a couple of years ago, and she immediately saw the the logic of it and we worked together on it. We basically put together a draft methodology. So, essentially, a set of questions or standards, against which we would evaluate a a piece of legislation. And the idea was that those standards would, you know, probe into everything that a good law should have. So and and, you know, hopefully, we more or less achieve that. We put in place an advisory, team with, you know, leading, RTI, experts from around the world, some of them advocates, some of them, you know, academics, some of them practitioners and the on the, you know, even on the government side and things. So we had a fairly balanced, and rounded advisory team. You know, we piloted the the methodology on a few laws to see how things were shaken. The the challenge, of course, was then, at that time, there were, if I remember correctly, around 85 laws globally, and which is a lot less than 140 of today, but it's still quite a few laws. And so we we then had to go through and assess all of those laws. And we also have another part of the methodology whereby we have a local experts review it because, you know, there may well be, for example, court decisions that we're unaware of that's in that, you know, even though the language as we read it suggests an interpretation going in that direction, they may put a more progressive interpretation on it or they may apply a constitutional interpretation. So they may change the meaning of the text by, you know, through constitutional interpretation, maybe amendments or regulations that we didn't, you know, pick up on or that we didn't manage to get in one of the languages that we can work in because we, we have a few languages available to us, but, obviously, not all of the languages, in the world. And so so so we have a local reviewer to make sure that we're, you know, picking up on all of those nuances. We didn't manage to find local reviewers for every single country, but most of the countries are, being reviewed by local reviewers. So we go through that procedure before we finalize the waiting and put it out. I would say in terms of changing over time, we have, so, you know, we have indicators, and most of the indicators get a score of, you know, zero, one, or two points, and a few of them have slightly more points depending on the design of the indicator. We have not changed the base indicator since it was first developed. And that would be I mean, we we we sort of would aspire to that, but that would be a huge project. We would have to get quite a lot of funding. We would have to go through the whole procedure of renewing the indicators, but then we would also need to go back and rerate every country. Right? So that's that's not a small thing to do. But we have, adjusted the scoring, interpretation or protocols, over time. So, you know, we we sort of realized that that, you know, this indicate we were a bit loose on some part of it and tightened it up. We've gotten more scientific or more concrete. Or even in some cases, we've changed a little bit the way we score. So we've had some flexibility in that in that respect. Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of strengths, I mean, really, the, you know, the biggest strength, is this, advocacy potential. You know, I mean, I as I I'm I'm like, I can't I've lost count of the number of countries where I've used that feature and, you know, gone to policymakers or or civil society. And, also, I mean, it allows civil society groups you know, we do a rating of draft law especially, and then the so so local civil society groups which are advocating for can say, okay. Here are here are exactly where the weaknesses are. These are important to us. We're gonna focus our firepower, on that and try to get changed from that. So, I mean, it has you know, it it's both in the kind of g ing up by comparative, reference, but also in terms of pinpointing exactly the weaknesses and things. So I think it's been been, you know, very, very strong, very, you know, hugely beneficial. In terms of weaknesses, I mean, one of the challenges is that it's you know, we're we're putting a template on the whole world in terms of what should be in a law. And I mean, you know, that doesn't always, fit, and we only credit, the issues which are, you know, legally or at least binding policy driven. So if you don't have a binding policy on something, at the minimum, you're not gonna get any points. So for example, one of them is our public bodies required to train their officials. So, you know, in a lot of, western countries, there's no rule about that. But, of course, officials are actually trained very well, much better than in some countries where there is a rule on that, but the rule isn't followed, but we're still not given the points. Because so, you know, there are some some frictions, I would say, when you try to apply a template to the whole world. But by and large, I would say it's been a very successful piece of work. When the rating first came out and Western countries were way down, you know, and there were a bunch of Western, you know, people, including commissioners and government officials and whatever who were, you know, either incredulous or unhappy or whatever it was with that. When we come back at them and say, look. Basically, your law is weak. We'll we'll do a nuts and bolts eye. We'll go bing, bing, bing, bing, and show you how your law is weakened. There's nothing to quibble about that. The problem there is you that your law is weak. And if you wanna not be at the bottom, fix it. You know? And and and when we when we come back like that, you know, defending our methodology because it is defensible and, you know, there may be five points that they could ahead that they should know whatever. But but, ultimately, you know, countries that are doing poorly are weak laws, and they need to fix it. That's the end of it. Yeah. Implementation is a much, much more complicated business with, you know, not to exaggerate, but a million different moving parts. For example, the primary, duty holders under these laws are individual public authorities, each one of which has to separately implement the law. And each one of them, you know, will be doing better or worse, in any given country. And so, you know, to and how do you assess all of that? So, I mean, so the the the RTI evaluation is we kinda call it for short, and that's the website name as well. It we don't come up with a ranking. We don't give a score. We give a red, yellow, green, which gives a general impression of you doing okay or not too well or better, because it's not that scientific. We rely on a selection of public authorities because at the end of the day, you can't assess all of them because there are at least hundreds in every country and often thousands or even more than that. So, you know, you just can't like, it's not feasible to measure them all, not properly anyway. So we we we grab a selection of them. We let local reviewers, you know, who the the methodology has to be driven by local actors. So unlike the art generating which we essentially do in house. So we have to work with local actors. We let them do that. They do test requests as part of the thing. So we we have four assessment areas. One is central measures, so the oversight system. One is institutional measures, so the, you know, whether public authority individual public authorities have adopted, appointed information officers, train them, manage their records, do that kind of stuff. Proactive disclosure and reactive disclosure. So the, you know, the the two main vehicles for actually disclosing it. For proactive disclosure, we look at, you know, is it proactively disclosed? And reactive disclosure among other things, we do test requests. So obviously and we let the local actors select the test request. So there's a huge variance. You know, they they they select some public authorities. They may select better performers. So we can't and another country may, by chance, select poor performers. We we can't really compare that, and they may put harder questions or weaker questions or whatever. But what I will say is that it I mean, it is it's a much more in-depth and complicated methodology. It takes us a long time to apply it and things, but it does it's a deep dive. It gives you a pretty, you know, complex like, every question that should be asked could be asked. And we by the way, we had a whole, system for developing it and piloting it and improving it as well, which I won't get get into too much detail about. But, it it really does, you know, give you a pretty good picture, of what's working and what's not working, in your system because it really looks at everything. We've applied it in about, eight to 10 countries. So it's because I mean, it's not it's a lot more different requires quite a lot of resources to apply and things like that. And I can say that I mean, firstly, we've been quite pleased with the way that, public authorities have and governments have engaged with this. You know, that by and large, you know, we're not we're not trying to hit them over the head with a hammer. I mean, you know, we're trying to help them improve their system. And oversight bodies in particular have by and large engaged, quite well with this. So that's nice. The issues that we're exposing, you know, while there's been a little bit of debate about them by and large people accept that those are issues and the things that do need to be improved, of course, to the next stage about whether you actually improve them. And that sometimes requires a bit more resources and things. But so, I mean, I would say that overall, we've had a, you know, quite a good engagement, with it. And, you know, it's led to in our in our projects on that side, we usually try to have, additional resources for remedial actions following the the the the the test. So, you know, you you you assess implementation, you find out where things are weak, and then you, you know, do something to address those at least. So, I would say it's been it's been it's been quite successful. And, I mean, the the the biggest challenge for us with that is getting the resources to apply anymore in more places. It's just it is pretty expensive. Yeah. I mean, I I can't stress enough the importance of, an empowered and independent oversight system information commissioner or commission. It it really it's it's it's the make or break. There's there's almost a kind of a bright blue line, you know, between those countries which don't have that and those countries which do. It doesn't mean that every country which has one of those is doing great. That would be, you know, a little too optimistic, but their chances of doing better are very strong. So that for me is a huge issue. Of course, it's, you know, it's expensive for countries to stand up those institutions. I would argue that they're gonna save the money in addressing corruption and inefficiency and, you know, maladministration. It's not not everything is about corruption. Sometimes just things aren't working properly because people aren't doing their job properly or whatever. They you know, not everything is a grand grand corruption issue, but but, you know, this helps expose all of that, and helps, you know, being open, engage as citizens in your development process. I think that that, you know, just leads to better development outcomes. So I think the money is easily recouped, but it's still cut off the budget, if you will. So countries are sometimes a little resistant. We just did a major exercise where we put the same two requests for information to, as many of the 140 countries with laws in the world as we could. And I can say that, you know, 38% of the responses that we got were mute refusals. Nothing. Nobody said anything. Nobody came back at all. I mean, we had a timeline of thirty days, which is not the timeline in every piece of legislation, although very few laws go beyond that. Like, there's a handful of them allow longer responses to that. We got a couple of formal extensions, but only a couple. You know, so, I mean, a mute refusal is a killer. Right? So, you know, that that's that's the biggest problem. We did not get a lot of accept people claiming exceptions. I was saying, oh, this information secret. We did not get a lot of charges. We did not get a lot of, as I said, extensions. What we most the the biggest and we got a lot of positive responses. We got some information in fifty one percent of the cases. So 51 plus 38, putting it close to 90. You know, so there's only a 10% that fell into other categories, but 38%, you know, refused. So I mean that, you know, probably those public bodies didn't appoint proper information officer, didn't have an information officer trained, person wasn't doing their job, you know, basic basic things. RTI evaluation, we are very, very open to civil society groups leading in terms of the implementation of that. And so if there are groups, you know, I mean, we we we don't have resources to support that, around the world. But if there are groups that are interested in doing it and have the resources themselves, we will provide them with the training and their, you know, the tools and the information that they need. We would you know, we really welcome that. So, please, anyone out there who's listening to this, and we also, are very much encouraged oversight bodies to lead on that process again if they can, you know, stand up a a few resources for it. We we estimate it takes about thirty person days if you hire a consultant to manage the whole process. So, I mean, it's a piece of work, but it's not a an enormous, piece of work. And we will, you know, support throughout, the the thing we're we're we're, you know, very interested in that. And now over to you, Giovanni.
It's really a pleasure to to be with you here today and share my, my work. Okay. So the focus of the presentation I'm I'm giving you, today is, related to this project, we have here at the ULB University in Brussels, which is called Transact, transparency in action. And it addresses the, issue the critical issue that, Toby Mandel, mentioned before, which is how to understand, study, explore the actual implementation of, FOI laws. Okay? So, this is the the the scope of this of this project. Let me start with few background information about this project. As I said, this is part of, the work, I'm conducting here at ULB as, a director of this, small but very interesting research center, which is called CEPAP, Centre d'etudes des politiques de la administration publique. So it's a research unit on public policy and administration and ULB. And one of the research access we have here is government transparency and freedom of information law. An access that, I've, set up with the, with my colleague and friend, Nasser Mabillard, a professor here at ULB. And what we what do we mean by government transparency in, in our work? We mean we refer to this as the practice of making government's actions, decisions, and governance processes, accessible to the public. And why this matters for, a research unit in public policy and administration? Because when these policies are effective, that information asymmetry between citizens, government officials is reduced or anyways mitigated. And this has a number of positive, effects in terms of governmental, accountability. So it improves if you want the functioning of democratic systems in this sense. And it also has positive effects in terms of efficiency and effectiveness of the public administration. For efficiency, leads to, a reduction of, corruption phenomena in this sense. So in this sense, it can improve to, the efficiency of public administration operations. So within the framework of this research axis that focus on government, transparency, here, at ULB, we have set up this project, which is called Transact. A huge support in the setting up of this project, was provided by our fellow colleagues in the University of of Naples, who, particularly provided us with expertise on field experiments. So we'll come back in a little bit on how field experiments are useful for, measuring, the what we call the implementation gap. And as also was mentioned by Julia in the introduction, this project relies on citizen science. What does it mean? That in the research process, there are certainly professional researchers, academics, and you have here the broad network that we have, and that has enabled us to run field experiments beyond, the Belgian context. Okay? We're now running similar experiments in Switzerland, Romania. We're preparing one in South Africa. But, when we rely on citizen science methodologies, nonprofessional researchers are involved in the design of the research, process and in the collection of the data needed to, accomplish this this research. And so we work a lot with civil society organizations. The project that I will present you today within Transact is our field experiment in Belgium, and this was not possible to be accomplished without the support of Transparencia Pandu, which is the organization managing in a in a lava teleplatforms here, in Belgium, and they were crucial to to work, and to design and implement the field experiments here in Belgium. But why we are so, interested in, in f y laws and their implementation? Well, this slide is particularly, explicative of this interest. And as, Toby Mander was saying also before, over the last years, there has been clearly, an increasing, adoption formal adoption of FYI laws around the world, across both democratic and non democratic countries. So regardless of the political system adopted within the country, these laws were increasingly, adopted by legislators. Okay? And you see on the right hand that a a wide majority of countries around the world has nowadays NFI law. Okay? But the literature, on this, on this on this laws is also clear about the fact that governments frequently comply with their own FOI legislation. Okay? So in practice, when a citizen file an FOI request to a public authority, there might be no response, partial response, a refusal, in disclosing information. And so this leads to low defacto compliance rates with the existing, legislation. And this is why and this is what we exactly call the implementation gap. Okay? So the implementation gap between the formal adoption of the law and the, implementation in practice of the law. If you want, there is a discrepancy between the de jure dimension of the law, the law on paper, the one adopted by a country and the the facto dimension of the law, how the law is practiced in the day to day activities of public administrations. And so what we want to do with our project and what we are doing actually since, 2022 is to, measure this implementation gap. So to size the the the to size it, but also to explain why this implementation gap, exists. Okay? As, Tobi Mendel was saying, there are, several indicators to measure, FYI loss. I he presented the RTI index. There is also the CPI index, which is the corruption perception index with the transparency index. But perhaps you might have noticed while I was going through the slides that, the the the ranking of countries according to the index was changing. Okay? And so here, there's an issue with the measurements of transparency. This becomes clear for efficiency if we look at what are the top five countries when, we use the RTI index that mainly measures the day you read dimension of the law. And when we look, at at countries and FYI systems through the lenses of an index such as the, transparency index, which tries to combine both the de facto dimension, the the the Europe dimension. So this is why, at one point, we were, with with my, with my colleagues and folks, let's say, from from the from the from the network, we got interested in, analyzing and measuring the de facto dimension of the law. And so we found that, very nice way of doing this is, the use of field experiments. Okay? What what what is a field experiment? Okay. So it's pretty intuitive. Experiments happen traditional experiments happen in in in the lab. Field experiments happen in the field, so directly in the in real world settings. So in relation to FYI laws and the implementation of FYI laws, it consists a field experiment in submitting systematically request to public administrations following a protocol, experimental protocol, and I'll be back in a little bit about this. Observing the responses of the public authorities and occasionally modifying the content of the request to go, the impact of these modifications on the responsiveness of the public, authorities. And so far, there have been, many experiments several, field experiments, conducting in different countries. The one in Italy was led by, our friends from the University of of, of Naples. We do we actively, contribute working on, on this on these experiments. And the one in Belgium that I will present you, now, as you see, Belgium was not, among the countries COVID, but by these approaches to to to to study the implementation gap. This was interesting for us because, Belgium has an FYI law since, 1994. Okay? The the transparency is, is part of the Belgian constitution, article 34, and regional laws have been adopted across the three regions to transpose the constitutional principles. Okay? And so nowadays, there are minimal differences among the the the regional laws, but an individual based on these laws can submit written request, including via mail to public administrations to have access to to government held documents. There is no need to demonstrate a specific interest, and, public administrations have, up to a maximum of forty five days to make the, the request document available to the requester unless, of course, the document is not covered by legal, exemptions of of the law. And so with Transparencia Pompeu, we we established contact with Transparencia Pompeu who beside managing the platform in Belgium is also active in lobbying and advocacy on this on this matters in Belgium. And, we decided to set up a field experiment. So we had two main questions. Okay? The first one was, do Belgian municipalities respond to FY request and provide the request information? Second question here is, do they discriminate among requesters? We know from the literature that I that, that has used field experiments that different requesters profile can trigger, let's say, different, responsive behaviors on the administration that they, that they approach. And so we decided to send requests in the Belgian experiment from three different profiles. Okay? A common citizen with a generic standard Belgian name, a French speaking, university professor known in the French speaking environment for his research on transparency, in our case was was Vincent Mabillard, and request sent from the transparency upon the, platform. And so request sent by individuals who are a part, let's say, of a civil society environment that has an interest in FOI laws. We also knew from the literature that, what can influence the likelihood of answering FOI requests is whether the request are mentioned or not the law into forcing their countries and granting them the right to access the, the the to us the the the the to act to us the the document. And so we decided that part of the request of the common citizen and the university professor were also sent, were sent either in parts by mentioning the law and in other part in the other part without mentioning the FOI law. Okay? We send this request to all 581 municipal administrations of of Belgium, and we had two experimental objectives. So the first one was to understand how municipalities react to different types of requested profiles. Second one was to test whether explicitly mentioning the FOI law, influenced the likelihood of responsiveness, of a response by the public, by the municipal administration. With transparency, we decided to, ask, this document, the the agenda of the last municipal council meeting with its annexes for two reasons. One is methodological. This document, is a standard document available in all Belgian municipalities, and so we could ask the same document to to all administrations. Second one was related to the previous advocacy work of, Transparencia Pambium, which was particularly interest and related to having public and municipal administrations in Belgium making this document available to citizens when this was requested by the citizens. And so they they they they they told us that a nice test would be around this this document. Okay? So here you see our experimental, design. Okay? So we based on the story I told you before and the design we did with, Transparencia. So in this sense, this was a citizen sciences experiment because we designed the experiment with Transparencia from view. We had five, experimental groups. Okay? A control group, the common citizen, baseline scenario, no mentioning FYI. Then the other four groups add some variations to the to the to this baseline scenario, and and these are what we call the treatment groups. Okay? So, a citizen mentioning FYI in the request, so the idea is to look at the effect of invoking rights when doing the request. Third group, professor, the effect of status. Fourth scenario, fourth group, for treatment group, professor mentioning the FYI, law, the combined effect of invoking rights and deviance status. And fifth group, the advocacy organization. So requests sent from, Transparencia point view when they arrive to the public administration, that is the signature of the platform. So they know that it's coming from the environment of Transparencia, Puanbeo. And then as we usually do in, in experiments, we randomized the allocation of the request, which stratify the randomization because we want to check if there are any effects related to the region in which the municipality is placed and the sides of of the, of the of the city. Okay? And these are, standard approaches in the in the literature that deals with countries such as Belgium, which are federal countries and so have subnational levels of of governments. So the emails were sent in, English and Dutch, depending on the language on the municipality. And, we did this with the help of, students from my, course in innovations in policy evaluation. Part of the teaching I do to my students is, field experiments with an application to to f y laws. And so we we decided to to do together this experiment as, it was in 2023 as a part of the of the class. And so they were sending the the emails and, they coded under our supervision. Our colleagues from Naples were also involved. This is a picture from the class. We we coded the answers using five modalities. K. Five categories. No reply, denial, unsatisfactory reply, partial reply, and complete reply. Okay. So, five modalities to code the, the answers. And these are the the results. Okay? So I show you the results. So first of all, the 36% of municipalities, regardless of the treatment, so of the of the the the experimental group they were allocated, will not respond, whereas about 30% provided at least a partial reply. What is a partial reply? Perhaps they send the, the agenda, but not the annexes. Okay? So this is an example. Or we ask for all the annexes, then they send, only the 30% of the annexes. Okay? Secondly, while almost, 50% of small municipality did not provide a reply, over 50% of large municipalities provided at least a partial reply. K. So what is how what hypothesis? These are these are just descriptive statistics. Okay? But the so hard to to have, statistically, causality that can be established here. We're working on that now. But the hypothesis we I mean, one interpretation is that municipal size can, can impact the response behavior with larger municipalities being more responsive and likely to provide at least partial disclosure compared to smaller municipalities. Okay? So basically, large, municipal administrations because perhaps they have more resources, they perform better in, in answering. Second aspect, regional dimension. I said that, the ex that there was the the regional, certification in the organization. This is the results. Municipalities providing at least partial replies, so partial or full. In Brussels, at the 58% in Brussels region, Flanders Region, 46%, Wallonia, 21%. So one way of interpreting it is that perhaps, regional context can impact response and disclosure rates. Okay? So different governance systems at the regional, in regional administration can have an impact. Okay? Fourth aspect is the, the profile of the requesters. Okay? So we see that common citizens mentioning FOI laws in their request have the highest disclosure rates, whereas professors mentioning FOI and requests coming through have the highest no reply rates. Okay? So municipalities one way of interpreting this is that municipalities have higher resistance to reply to FOI requests coming from individuals that they perceive as knowledgeable about FYI requests. So somehow they perceive this request riskier. Okay? They see more risk in these people. Perhaps they could, do some inquire, okay, through, through the the request. And last aspect, that we decided to to check was this one. So, I told you that we had a group of students sending the request and we noticed that some group were very motivated. So they were where they were very fast in the following up with, administrations, asking, more information about the request. Other were just following the baseline of the protocol, the experimental protocol. Okay? So and we decided to to measure this commitment, okay, using the grading system of Belgian, education, universities. Okay? And what we found was that higher levels of citizen commitments, so the grade, correlates with higher municipality, correlate with municipalities' higher response rates and higher disclosure rates. And we also see that, higher commitment correlates with higher citizen bureaucrat interaction. So more interactions between, the requester and the administration on the other side. So this was interesting because, this suggests that citizens' commitment in submitting FY request can influence municipalities' response behavior. So I move towards the end, and what are the key takeaways of this experiment, and what are the hypothesis we're working, now with with our colleagues? First, regional differences matter. Okay? So there are distinct governance models that can impact how the laws are implemented in practice. The municipal size matters, and we see that larger municipalities perform better in implementing the law. Okay? So there is here perhaps something to be understood in terms of, equipment and resources in handling FY requests. Requesters identity is, play a role as well in the implementation of the law in practice. We see that actors seen as knowledgeable in FOI because they are perhaps perceived more, risky, are those who are who who face more difficulties in accessing the law. Okay? This is clearly problematic, especially for journalists, for instance. Okay? Especially if we consider the the the periods, we are living now, in democratic societies. And and fourth, the citizens engagement. This is very interesting because on the one end, we usually look at the, supply side of, transparency policy. So basically, the information providers. Okay? The the public administration. How we improve the supply side. Okay? How we improve the way how information is provided. But here we see that the demand side is also important. So, basically, the information seekers and how the information seekers deploy strategies to secure the, the the information. Last slide about the next step. As I said, now we're trying to to, have a better understanding of the hypothesis that I showed you while I was mentioning the the the results. And we've also launched more experiments. As I said, one was just accomplished in Switzerland. One is going to start in Romania, and we're planning one in South Africa. Beside of that, we've decided to retrieve information also from, Alava deli platforms using Transparencia Pambio as a, as a case study. And we want to run the same type of, study, basically. We want to see how the request topic told the recipient, authority influenced the likelihood of receiving a reply, or a refusal or, a silence on the, side of of the, administration. And, I stop here.
Thank you for your attention. Thank you so much, Giovanni. That was fantastic. I will now invite
Maria to give her presentation. Thank you so much. Yes. So I'm looking into the demand side. So, my main research question was, what is it that the public is actually interested, to know from the information request? And I started this, looking at the request, sent to the UK central government through what do they know platform. So just to give you, just to give you a brief overview of the presentation. So I'll, present the main research question. I, discuss a bit the literature that I dropped from, but, very briefly, and then talk about the data, I used, how I analyze them, and then, I get to the finding. So the main research question that, somehow drove, this research was exactly this. Like, what is it, that the public want to know from the from the government, and in this case, from the, from the UK government? And I was, primarily interested, whether it is, this accountability seeking, like, holding, the governments accountable, that drives citizens to submit, access to information requests, or are the the the interests of, requesters much broader? And, how how I approach access to information in this work. So, at the at the beginning, I started, with this very common definition of access to information as access to complete accurate public interest information. But I put the public interest into brackets because my findings actually contest, this, this definition to some extent. And I'll get that, get, back to this, when I discuss fund findings. I was mostly, interested in demand, because I feel, the research on transparency, and I myself, consider a researcher, focusing mostly on the politics of transparency reforms. Like, we focus on many, different areas. But much of this research, including my own, was always based on this assumption that, access to information policies, they serve, government oversight function. So, they are mostly envisaged, and adopted with this, with this intention to hold the government and other powerful actors accountable, and that has also implications, for the use. So there is this underlying assumption that access to information legislation and requests, they would be submitted mostly exactly to expose, corruption or mismanagement on of, of public resources. So there has been always this transparency accountability relations. But this has been very rarely tested. So I was curious, to look into the, to the information request for, these precise reasons to see if this is actually the case, if citizens submit, information requests, with this in mind. And I think this is not only because of the lack of interest in the topic, but also, because of the difficulty to study this because there are very few, public administration portals that make this data available. I was aware of the of the Mexican, government portal that allowed to see all the interactions between requesters and, and public servant and to see how they responded and when they responded. So that was possible, and there has been fantastic research, done, by, Dan Berliner and his coauthors on Mexican information request. There's something, by Doquena on Albanian requests and, also something on The US. But, in general, this is very difficult to study because, there's a lack of, lack of comprehensive information. And, when I, when I looked at the information demand, I found this, information gathering matrix, a conceptual framework developed by, Greg Michener and Benjamin Worthy quite useful because they argue that, actually, the uses might be very heterogeneous, and, requesters might submit requests, in public or, private interest. And in terms of, content, it might be political or completely nonpolitical. And I'm mentioning this because it was very useful for me then, when I looked into the requests, to somehow categorize them. Why I decided, to focus on The UK and what do they know. So, also for what, Giovanni mentioned that, in The UK I mean, I think it's one of the cases where there's also a quite big demand but also quite good supply. And, access to information legislation in The UK has been widely used, and I think, the some something that helped to some extent also to make it very, well known as a legislation was also m, MP's expenses scandal. And, so there has been there has been an increase in in requests, to to the central government at least based on the on the statistics that, the cabinet office, publishes on on annual basis. But at the same same time also, as Giovanni mentioned that one thing is that the citizen engagement can drive responsiveness and better responses. It also works the other way around. The better responses then encourage citizens to engage more, with the law. So, and in The UK still, I mean, although the the rate of information requests that are being responded on time is decreasing every year. That's also available in the cabinet, office, annual statistics. But still, I would say that the rate of 76% being responded on time is quite, quite decent. So, for me, it was mostly this use and also the supply of information that makes it interesting because there's a wealth of data. And it's also, interesting because information requests are, real world interactions. So there's there's very little bias that comes that comes in. And so what data I use and analyze? So I have to first of all, thanks to mySociety because my research wouldn't be possible, without them and without, what do they know platform. So the data I analyzed is basically around 40,000 almost 40,000 information requests that were sent to The UK central government bodies, via what do they know, within a decade from 2008 and 2017. And, I'm looking, in the full text of, requests and the date, it was submitted, mostly these two variables. And, just, maybe some descriptive, data, in case you're interested. So, the the institution or the the government body that, received the highest, number, of, of request was Department of Work and Pensions, then Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Justice, Department of Education, department of health and social care. And, I haven't included all of them, because some really receives there are there are actually few that receives a handful, handful of requests, per year. And I also, must disclose that I haven't included home office, for privacy reasons because there were too many, personal data, in in the request themselves. So home office is completely excluded, from the analysis. And how I analyze the data? So I used the text to data approaches, concretely, topic modeling. So I, estimated the topic, model on this data, which, means that it basically estimate the probability of finding, certain topics within a corpus of textual data, in this case, information requests. And I also had to get rid of the words that are very common or occur frequently in communication between public servant and requester. So, things like, greetings or, titles or then the institutions, like, when they address dear dear officer at the ministry x and y. And, these are the results. So, when it comes, to the topics that were mostly predominant, in the sample of, information requests from 2000, '8 to 2017. The most prevalent, most predominant was, welfare reform. Then the, second one, was labeled as related to transparency, and requesters mostly asked about correspondence, between government members, and and lobbyists or or or other important figures of, political and economic life. And then, the the the third was official statistics. Fourth, most predominant, again, linked to transparency and requesters mostly ask about meetings, minutes, expenses. Then, then it was followed by, asking for, for legal documents, for rules, guidelines related to, public administration, and, then education. And then you can see the list of, those, those remaining. What was for me interesting to see, that, yes, there were, topics that clearly, deal with, accountability seeking. So the topic four, where requesters ask about, correspondence or topic 20 when they ask for, meetings minutes or expenses. There were there were some others as well. So another one that, was labeled as transparency asked for for documents, for contracts. But in general, when I, had a look at this information gathering metrics that I introduced at the beginning and tried to categorize, all these, all these topics within within these quadrants of this matrix, I was able to came to the conclusion that, basically, yes, accountability seeking, requests are very important. They are they are still predominant. But, in reality, they account only for one third of all requests. So the rest, were these requests that could have been labeled as informing to empower or securing some personal benefits or ensuring fairness. And, I was, curious also about, this, most predominant topic, that I labeled as the welfare reform, because all of these, requests to some extent, related to the welfare reform. And what you can see in this figure is, how this topic, how the how the proportion of requests related to the welfare reform, how they evolved over time during the study period, so from 2008 to 2018. And as you can see, there has been a slight increase starting in 02/1011, and then, there there has been a high increase in information request asking, about welfare reform around 02/1314, and the interest in the topic was, let's say, up until 2016. And if you look at the I mean, how how the method work is that, the the first part is, basically just a statistical method, trying to somehow group these words based on the, group these topics based on the semantic proximity of the words. But then, of course, I had to read the the the sample for each topic, in full so I'm able to make sense of these topics. And it was it was possible to clearly see that, yes, there is a link be because in 2012, there was this welfare reform act in The UK adopted. And then in 2015, there was welfare reform and work act adopted. And when I read through the through some of the information requests, mostly, it was not even information request per se as they are, as they are defined, in legal terms, but mostly complaints of these, policy beneficiaries, who who said that they are very confused about the changes that have been introduced, that they don't fully understand them, and they they really did not receive well, these, these policy changes. So, mostly, they raised criticism and also sought clarification. There were many, information requests, asking about, what is the method for for calculating the pension age or, many just basically concluded that, severely disabled people with lifelong conditions were suddenly, assessed as fit to work. So they they, like, oftentimes, this was used information requests were used to raise these concerns about, about this, new policy in place and how it was ill conceived. So they they argued that, that the reformed left vulnerable disadvantaged groups behind and stigmatized them even further. So for me, this was one of the most interesting findings that information requests were used in a completely different way that they were initially intended when these reforms were adopted. So beyond this accountability seeking and here I also included, the the in another topic, that was labeled as disability and fit for work assessment over time where the results were basically very similar to what I just described about the welfare reform. So, again, mostly rather than, information requests, in a strict sense, they were used as a platform to raise concerns. And, to conclude, because this session is, called, is, access to information, working well in practice? And I I was thinking about this question, in relation to my research, and I think it very much depends on where you stand and what what you expect from transparency. So my findings, definitely, concluded that that the uses are manifold. They they go beyond accountability seeking and the the use and and of, of information request, but also the public demand demand for for information is very heterogeneous. And but I still think that despite, they are used for a for for gold that was not initially intended, in this reform, I I think it still works quite well, and I think we might want to look beyond this accountability framework and think about other benefits of information request. Because for me, it was really, kind of a litmus test of public support for new laws and policies, in case of this welfare reform. Because during the same, I mean, during the same period, there were other important legislation adopted in The UK that were, that they're very much discussed in the media, but they didn't, but they didn't, it wasn't reflected in information request. So people didn't ask about this. And the reason was that these were accepted very well, whereas welfare reform people had many reservation. So I think it's also a useful source of information for policy policymakers on on how people actually re react to, to the new policies. So I would argue that maybe information requests are not always, submitted, in line with what they were for foreseen for, but still, this is very useful. So, they might point to other things that don't work well in practice. So for instance, if someone, has to use information request to ask about his immigration status or to ask about how his, pension age should be calculated, it clearly shows that there's something not working well with these, with these, policies that should or with the agencies that should be dealing with these issues. So in my view, I would conclude that, yes, maybe the uses are different than we expected, but I think it's still extremely useful. So thank you.
Thank you so much, Maria. That was fantastic. So interesting. And I feel like we covered a really great range of, topics across the the three presentations. Thank you to our amazing speakers, Maria and Giovanni, and Toby.
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