Commentary: A Virtuous Circle? Open Data Should Drive Records Request Response

• Author: Stephen Larrick
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12703
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• Date: 01 January 2017

A Virtuous Circle? Open Data Should Drive Records Request Response 77

A Virtuous Circle?

Open Data Should Drive Records Request Response

Stephen Larrick is Open Data Project

lead for the Sunlight Foundation, a

nonpartisan nonprofit working to make

twenty-first-century democracy more

transparent and accountable. Previously,

he was city planner for Central Falls, Rhode

Island.

E-mail: slarrick@sunlightfoundation.com

Commentary

T he authors of “Transparency by Conformity:

A Field Experiment Evaluating Openness

in Local Government” have produced

an important article for the field of government

transparency. While their conclusion that

“governments … conform to their peers’ [public

records] request fulfillment behavior” is not

surprising, they have begun to meet the long-

standing need for a robust treatment of open

government practice from the lens of an empirical,

applied “network-theoretic” approach. As they

point out, the transparency and open government

field, by and large, has “not examined the influence

that government organizations have on one

another.” Their study should be celebrated

for providing compelling evidence for such

influence.

The authors demonstrate convincingly that (1) when

records request fulfillment behavior is made visible

to a local government, (2) the subject government

is more likely to conform to the behavior of its peer

Stephen Larrick

Sunlight Foundation