Title | Information requests and local accountability: an experimental analysis of local parish responses to an informational campaign |
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Post date | 05/26/2015 |
C1 Background and Explanation of Rationale |
"Transparency has become a central tenet of what constitutes good governance (Hood 2010). It is also now a key part of citizens’ democratic expectations and rights, increasingly enforced by national and international legislation and legal rulings (Darch and Underwood 2010). Not only is transparency now viewed as desirable in and of itself, it is also expected to bring about a series of benefits, including greater accountability, increased trust and better decision-making while also acting as deterrent to corruption (Hazell et al 2010; Meijer 2014). There are a growing number of transparency mechanisms available to governments to help public authorities reach an acceptable standard of information provision. These can be embedded within the formal frameworks governing how public authorities operate, such as the rules of disclosure on meeting minutes, or driven by the ethical stance of public officials or the more political wish to have their actions recorded for public debate and scrutiny. Such ideas have influenced studies of accountability and responsiveness in a variety of settings (Ferraz and Finan 2011). |
C2 What are the hypotheses to be tested? |
"Hypothesis 1: Local authorities will be more responsive to an FOI request than to a normal request |
C3 How will these hypotheses be tested? * |
The outcome variable consists of the five ordinal categories shown above. First of all, we analyse the variance between the mean of the dependent variable (DV) across the two treatments and control groups (ANOVA). Secondly, we will also take into consideration the control variables mentioned above by carrying out an ordinal outcome variable regression analysis. |
C4 Country | |
C5 Scale (# of Units) | not provided by authors |
C6 Was a power analysis conducted prior to data collection? | Yes |
C7 Has this research received Insitutional Review Board (IRB) or ethics committee approval? | Yes |
C8 IRB Number | not provided by authors |
C9 Date of IRB Approval | not provided by authors |
C10 Will the intervention be implemented by the researcher or a third party? | Researchers |
C11 Did any of the research team receive remuneration from the implementing agency for taking part in this research? | No |
C12 If relevant, is there an advance agreement with the implementation group that all results can be published? | No |
C13 JEL Classification(s) | not provided by authors |