Electoral Incentives and Government Transparency: Evidence from Freedom of Information Requests

Transparency is a basic requirement of government accountability, allowing citizens to access the information necessary to monitor, reward, and punish politicians and bureaucrats. Yet transparency inevitably involves discretion by the same government that is being evaluated. In this paper, we show that reelection incentives affect transparency, by comparing the responsiveness of freedom-of-information requests made via the online platform MuckRock just before state and municipal elections to those filed elsewhere at the same time. 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 an election. We first document that FOIA rejection rates are positively correlated with a standard measure of state-level corruption. Our main analyses then show that rejections and delays of FOIA requests in state and municipal agencies are higher ahead of (state and city) elections in high-corruption settings. Overall, our results suggest that discretion may be used to limit access to information relevant to political accountability.