Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Government Information Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf Does the freedom of information law increase transparency at the local level? Evidence from a field experiment Peter Spáč a , Petr Voda b, ⁎ , Jozef Zagrapan c a Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Jostova 10, Brno 602 00, Czech Republic b International Institute of Political Science, Jostova 10, Brno 602 00, Czech Republic c Sociologický ústav SAV, Slovenská akadémia vied, Klemensova 19, Bratislava 813 64, Slovakia 1. Introduction Transparency is an important attribute of public administration (cf. Bauhr & Grimes, 2014; Heald, 2006; Worthy, John, & Vannoni, 2017). In general, information availability facilitates public accountability (cf. Meijer, 2014; Olsen, 2015). Transparency increases control over gov- ernment, as it allows society to consider information that is otherwise kept secret. Scholars agree that transparency generally enhances public acceptance of political decisions, reduces corruption and provides more legitimacy to democratic governments (de Fine Licht, 2014; Hood, 2006; Meijer, Hart, & Worthy, 2015). In addition, transparency may stimulate the performance of political representatives, as the disclosure of their mistakes and failures can eventually reduce their support (cf. Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer, 2012; James & Moseley, 2014). On the contrary, Fenster (2015) challenges the simplified understanding of transparency and concludes that for a functional state a balance be- tween transparency and secrecy is necessary. Furthermore, Fenster (2015: 150) argues that “transparency is best understood as a theory of communication that excessively simplifies and thus is blind to the complexities of the contemporary state, gov- ernment information, and the public”. From this perspective it is im- portant to study less abstract phenomena related to transparency. This article aims to study one such aspect of the concept of transparency – the compliance of officials to FOI legislation. This legislation provides citizens with the right to ask for information and binds public officials to respond to such demands. However, in the end, the requests are processed by officers. Therefore, how the requests are processed is just as important as the implementation of FOI laws. The first FOI acts were enacted in Sweden in 1766. However, the mass wave of adoption of such law began in 1966, when the USA adopted their FOIA. According to Hazell and Worthy (2010), by 2010 around ninety countries had adopted this legislation, while another fifty were preparing such measures. In 2017, the number of countries with FOI acts was higher than 115 (Freedominfo, 2017). Hence, over time FOI acts have become a rather regular feature in countries worldwide (cf. Walby & Larsen, 2012; Worthy, 2017). It is crucial to examine to what extent FOI laws are followed in practical terms. In other words, for FOI acts to fulfil their role in pro- viding access to information to the public, the compliance of public officials is a necessary condition. In a growing number of countries, research on the effectiveness of such laws has already been conducted (cf. Cherry & McMenemy, 2013; Michener, 2015; Michener & Worthy, 2015). These studies mostly cover either Western democracies or de- veloping countries. One of our aims is to contribute to this state of the art by analyzing Slovakia - a relatively new democracy belonging to a group of post-communist countries in Central Europe. So far, this group's compliance with FOI has not been examined by researchers. A profile of Slovakia provides the opportunity to carry out research of FOI compliance in a new context uncovered by the existing literature. Transparency and its consequences do not work free of context, but they depend on the institutional and political factors of political sys- tems (cf. Cucciniello, Porumbescu, & Grimmelikhuijsen, 2017). This explains why, under some constellations, transparency reinforces the trust of society in public institutions, while in others such effects do not appear (cf. de Fine Licht, 2011; Welch, Hinnant, & Moon, 2005). This is yet another reason to conduct studies in new contexts. Researchers agree that central policies are not always followed by local agencies (cf. Berliner, 2017; Ross & Whittaker, 2009). We thus examine whether FOI laws assist the public in their demand for in- formation at the local level. More precisely, we aim to answer how the FOI act improves the chances of receiving information from munici- palities and how this effectiveness is affected by the characteristics of municipalities. In doing so, we divided the municipalities into three groups. The control group received a baseline request, while two ex- perimental groups received the same request with an additional para- graph, either including a moral appeal or a reference to FOI act. We found that FOI requests led to a higher responsiveness from local au- thorities, while the moral appeal had no effect. This relation is already known in the current literature. What is new is that the effect of the content of the requests is moderated by the capacity of the requested authority. While the FOI requests led to a substantially higher response rate by public authorities in less populated municipalities, in bigger cities, which tend to have more staff, this effect is diminished and the form of the request became less relevant. Finally, we also found a https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2018.05.003 Received 23 January 2018; Received in revised form 27 March 2018; Accepted 7 May 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: pvoda@apps.fss.muni.cz (P. Voda). Government Information Quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0740-624X/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Spáč, P., Government Information Quarterly (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2018.05.003