The Law: Government Transparency and Public Access

Abstract

National governments regularly balance concerns of transparency and access to information against the need for information security and confidentiality. Increased government transparency can inform the public of the reasons underlying government decisions and can promote the participation of outside parties and actors. However, increased transparency can uncover wrongdoing that can lead to embarrassment or legal action against government actors. This project explores the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and analyzes how politicization affects aggregate federal executive branch transparency. Utilizing FOIA initial disposition data across the Bush II and Obama administrations, I find a complex relationship between politicization, as indicated by aggregate appointee presence within an agency, and FOIA requests outcomes. I find that increased politicization is associated with a higher proportion of responses, noting that agencies were not able to locate responsive FOIA records. However, I find less evidence that politicization affects the aggregate amount of information released to requesters from retrieved records.

To preserve, release, and litigate: Dimensions of executive branch transparency

“…Attorney General guidance can either encourage discretion in the direction of greater openness or greater conservatism in releasing records that may be exempt from disclosure. Attorneys General Eric Holder's and Merrick Garland's guidance memos both reference a preference for openness, 38 whereas Attorney General John Ashcroft's memo was criticized for seemingly encouraging caution with disclosures (Coglianese, 2009;Johnson, 2021b). Interestingly, William Barr did not release a formal FOIA guidance memo, which meant that the previous memo released by Attorney General Eric Holder would remain in place during his tenure.…”

Transparent Perception and Police Trust Against the Background of Wide Application of Police Portal Websites

“…The proposal of the research hypothesis Government Transparency, as the state of the public's understanding of the operation process and derived outcomes of government administrative actions (Zhang, Zhuo, 2018), [1] has received attention from both academic and practical communities for its important role in improving the quality of government and promoting the implementation of good governance (Johnson Gbemende E, 2021) [2] . Existing research believes that government transparency is an organic unity of people's subjective transparency perception and the actual degree of government's external publicity, which should not only focus on the accessibility, truthfulness, reliability, and timeliness of the information released by the government at the objective level (HuangPu, 2020), [ 3] but also pay attention to the overall evaluation of the above process by the public, and this leads to the core concept of the paper: public transparency perception.…”