“…Second, we show that making a formal FOIA request significantly increases access to municipal government officials. This second contribution advances a growing comparative FOIA compliance literature (Grimmelikhuijsen, John, Meijer, & Worthy, 2018;Michener, Velasco, Contreras, & Rodrigues, 2020;Peisakhin, 2012;Rodríguez & Rossel, 2018;Worthy, John, & Vannoni, 2017) and is vital in showing that FOIAs are an effective means of increasing transparency in the municipal governments of California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. As Grimmelikhuijsen et al (2018) argue, there is immense value in increasing the number of FOIA compliance studies in order to allow us to exploit cross polity variation in institutional design.…”