Sunshine as Disinfectant: The Effect of State Freedom of Information Act Laws on Public Corruption

“Big Tigers, Big Data”: Learning Social Reactions to China's Anticorruption Campaign through Online Feedback

“…C orruption has detrimental effects on both economic well-being (Liu and Mikesell 2014 ;Liu, Moldogaziev, and Mikesell 2017 ;Rose-Ackerman 1999 ) and public trust in government (Seligson 2002 ;Villoria, Van Ryzin, and Lavena 2013 ). Previous research has examined a wide array of anticorruption strategies, such as increasing government transparency (Brunetti and Weder 2003 ;Cordis and Warren 2014 ), streamlining and reforming government (Goel and Nelson 1998 ;Neshkova and Kostadinova 2012 ), building strong anticorruption agencies (Klitgaard 1988 ;Quah 2011 ), and improving bureaucrats ' quality and integrity by promoting civil servants ' material incentives and intrinsic motivation (Azfar and Nelson 2007 ;Perry 1996 ;Perry and Hondeghem 2008 ). These measures are conducive to the quality of long-term governance.…”

Dynamic transparency: An audit of Mexico's Freedom of Information Act

“…Several studies have examined the connection between FOIA and governance. For instance, Cordis and Warren () and Islam () find positive effects of FOIA on governance in different settings in the US and globally, respectively. However, it is difficult to expect FOIAs to have any impact on governance outcomes if such laws do not actually guarantee access to government information.…”

Corruption Via Media Capture: The Effect of Competition

“…Hence, our model points to the need of incorporating interactions between government transparency and media competition to empirically assess latter's role in deterring corruption. The relatively sparse empirical literature that exists on this topic (Cordis and Warren ; Drago, Nannicini, and Sobbrio ) typically tends to study the effects of greater media competition or transparency on corruption separately without considering interactions between the two perhaps due to data limitations…”

“…However, it does not study the impact of competition on corruption and it does not consider interactions between transparency and competition across the municipalities. Cordis and Warren (), using state level data on United States, finds that improvements to Freedom of Information laws (and therefore greater transparency) contribute to reducing corruption and that this effect is more pronounced in states with higher media coverage. However, the article does not specifically study the impact of increased media competition and therefore does not account for interactions between competition and transparency.…”