Assessing the performance of freedom of information Robert Hazell, Ben Worthy ⁎ Constitution Unit at University College London, UK abstract article info Available online 3 August 2010 Keywords: Freedom of Information FOI Performance How well has the UK FOI Act worked in practice now that it has been in force for 4 years? This article discusses how to measure the performance of FOI regimes. It presents the evidence on the performance of FOI in the UK measured against comparative data from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland, countries with access to information legislation and similar political systems. On a range of measures, the UK Act is found to have performed reasonably well, but it also suffers from problems common to all FOI regimes. The article concludes with some observations on what makes for a successful FOI regime, and how to measure it. © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. 1. Introduction: the global reach of FOI In the past two decades freedom of information legislation has moved from being a legislative “luxury” enjoyed by a few advanced democracies to becoming an accepted part of the democratic landscape. Around ninety countries now have access to information regimes in place and another fifty have legislation pending (Banisar, 2006; Mendel, 2008; Vleugels, 2009). From India to South Africa and Mexico to China, states of varying degrees of development, size, and political persuasion have embraced openness and FOI. There is increasing legal recognition from national courts and from interna- tional bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that FOI is a human right (Mendel, 2008; Freedomofinfo.org, 2009). Alongside the rapid spread of FOI, there has been growing interest in trying to measure its impact and effectiveness. Many FOI laws are “paper” laws, passed in response to domestic or international pressures for transparency and good governance for “symbolic purposes,” with little or no implementation machinery (Relly & Sabharwal, 2009). International donors and civil society organizations have begun to develop performance measures in an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the new laws. These evaluation attempts are still in their infancy. Broadly they encompass four different kinds. First, there are the attempts to compile aggregate indicators of good governance, which include indicators of transparency and accountability. Examples are provided by the World Bank Institute (Kaufmann, Kraay, & Zoido, 1999; Relly & Sabharwal, 2009), and by indices compiled by international NGOs such as Freedom House, the Centre for Public Integrity, and Transparency International. Some studies also attempt to examine factors that can help determine transparency levels or perceptions of transparency, such as access to information legislation, telecommunications access, or press freedom (Islam, 2006; Relly & Sabharwal, 2009). Government departments in the lead on FOI, such as the Justice Department in the US, the Ministry of Finance in Ireland, and the Ministry of Justice in the UK, also collect and publish statistics on FOI on their respective websites. The Obama administration has ordered that each department and agency create a new FOI annual report detailing request numbers and also delays (EOP, 2009). All the above indicators are at too high a level of aggregation to provide any useful data on the effectiveness of FOI. Second, there are cross-country comparative surveys conducted by journalists. These tend to focus on only one group of FOI requesters, the media (e.g., Lidberg, 2002), and some of the studies are concerned as much with freedom of the press as they are with FOI. Third, there are studies which consider the use of standardized FOI requests in different countries and compare the quality of the responses. These are methodologically more rigorous, but complicated and expensive to organize; only one such study has been conducted, funded by the Soros Open Society Justice Initiative (Open Society Justice Initiative 2006). Fourth, there have been attempts to analyze the impact of FOI in a particular country, often with a view to reforming the Act. White's 2007 work on New Zealand and the large scale analysis of the Indian Right to Information legislation are two good examples of this emerging trend (White, 2007; RaaG/NCPRI, 2009). Others have begun to examine the impact of FOI on particular parts of the world, with Darch and Underwood's excellent study examining the particular issues around FOI in the developing world (Darch & Underwood, 2010). The difficulty of measuring the performance of FOI laws was the subject of a conference in 2008 organized by the Carter Centre in Atlanta. The Centre's conference paper opens by asking how we should define “success” for a FOI regime (Horsley, 2008). The difficulties of how to assess FOI feed into a wider problem of performance measurement. Julnes and Holzer (2001) point out that there exist two distinct approaches: rational assessment of technical Government Information Quarterly 27 (2010) 352–359 ⁎ Corresponding author. The Constitution Unit, School of Public Policy, UCL, 29-30 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9QU. E-mail address: b.worthy@ucl.ac.uk (B. Worthy). 0740-624X/$ – see front matter © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.giq.2010.03.005 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Government Information Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf