Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act

Abstract

Institutional reforms often face challenges of poor compliance and implementation at the local level. I analyze these in a context where weak state capacity and limited enforcement make widespread compliance unlikely. South Africa's 2000 Promotion of Access to Information Act tasked the South African Human Rights Commission with monitoring and promoting compliance, but with limited resources and no authority to sanction. I argue that local political competition can generate endogenous incentives for compliance, even under conditions of weak capacity and limited external enforcement. Using data on 234 South African municipalities over 10 years, I find higher levels of compliance among more politically competitive municipalities. The results are not simply a function of differences between African National Congress–governed municipalities and others, and are robust to numerous controls for different forms of local state capacity.

Cheap talk or incredible commitment? (Mis)calculating transparency and anti‐corruption

“…Studies of compliance have mostly looked at how much information governments disclose, how quickly, how accurately, and so forth (e.g., OSJI, ). Only few have gone beyond to look at what institutional factors explain implementation of TACPs (Trapnell & Lemieux, ) and even fewer take into account political incentives for compliance (Berliner, ).…”

“…The article focuses specifically on two TACPs, the freedom of information act (FOIA) and public asset disclosure for high-level officials (PAD), for two reasons. First, while there is substantial research on political drivers of FOIA (Bennett, 1997;Berliner, 2014Berliner, , 2016Berliner & Erlich, 2015;Michener, 2011Michener, , 2014Roberts, 2003Roberts, , 2006Roberts, , 2010, PAD has been much less investigated. Second, the original puzzle is even more pronounced for PAD, because it imposes more immediate cost on decision makers.…”

Barriers to Open Government Data (OGD) initiative in Tanzania: Stakeholders’ perspectives

“…The third study is conducted at the local government level where the Promotion of Access to Information Act of the South African government is investigated (Berliner, 2017). The study underlines the hindrances in the form of improper compliance and limited enforcement of government reforms, for instance, the Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000 which was launched by the South African government.…”

Nothing to hide: Commitment to, compliance with, and impact of the special data dissemination standard

“…States that engage in this type of behavior would clearly face a significant political cost in increasing the transparency of their data collection, compilation, and dissemination. Alternatively, Berliner (), Berliner and Erlich (), and Berliner ()—all find that a competitive political environment increases the incentives for political actors to introduce transparency initiatives. Focusing on data transparency, Williams () finds that the release of data by the government improves bureaucratic quality, investment, and financial sector development in the short as well as in the long run.…”