Open government

• 1. Introduction

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  Open government is the doctrine that citizens have a right to see the documents and proceedings of the state that rules them. Kenya wrote that right into its constitution. As of 2010, section 35 gives every citizen access to information held by the State. It also says the State shall publish and publicize any important information affecting the nation. A sentence like that sounds simple. Carrying it out is far harder. Governments have long justified secrecy by appealing to reason of state, and open government is the doctrine that pushes back against that habit. Today it is tied to democratic reform. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 16 even treats public access to information as a mark of accountable and inclusive institutions. This documentary asks where the idea came from and what it actually asks of a government. It also asks a harder question. Does more openness always make government better, or can it quietly make government worse?

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• 2. Old Roots

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  In fifth century B.C.E. Athens, an official could be made to answer for an entire year of work. The institution that did it was the euthyna. It held officials to a standard of "straightness" and required them to give an account of everything they had done before an Assembly of citizens. Athens had other legal bodies that regulated officials and gave ordinary citizens a way to voice grievances against them.

  The modern argument took shape in the European Age of Enlightenment. Philosophers of the period attacked absolutist doctrines of state secrecy and argued that government should be open to public scrutiny and responsive to public opinion. They were debating how a new democratic society ought to be built.

  Sweden produced the first formal law. Its Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 was enacted as part of the constitution, at a time when Finland was a Swedish-governed territory. Influenced by Enlightenment thought, the revolutions in the United States in 1776 and in France in 1789 went on to write public budgetary accounting and freedom of the press into constitutional articles.

  The nineteenth century brought a backlash. Statesmen in the tradition of Metternich tried to row back these measures. They met vigorous resistance from liberal politicians and writers, among them Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton.

  The Scandinavian countries claim the first freedom of information legislation and trace its modern provisions to the eighteenth century. Finland kept the presumption of openness after it became independent in 1917. It passed its Act on Publicity of Official Documents in 1951, and new legislation superseded that act in 1999.

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• 3. A Postwar Phrase

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  In 1957, a congressional staffer named Wallace Parks gave the idea its modern name. Parks served on a subcommittee on Government Information created by the U.S. Congress. His article that year was titled "The Open Government Principle: Applying the Right to Know under the Constitution." The Freedom of Information Act followed in 1966, and federal courts then began using the phrase as a synonym for government transparency.

  The phrase was born from frustration. After World War II, American federal departments and agencies started limiting access to information. They were reacting to wartime hostilities and to fear of Cold War spies. Agencies were allowed to deny access "for good cause found" or "in the public interest." Those loose standards made it hard for congressional committees to get records and documents, and that pushed lawmakers to look for legislative remedies.

  In 2009, President Obama released a memorandum on transparency and open government and started the Open Government Initiative. The memorandum set a goal of strengthening democracy through a government that was transparent, participatory and collaborative. The initiative also promised to end secrecy in Washington and to improve effectiveness through more communication between citizens and government officials.

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• 4. What It Means

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  Two researchers, Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson, wrote a paper called "The New Ambiguity of 'Open Government'." They separated open government from open data. They defined open government in terms of service delivery and public accountability. Technology can help disclose information, they argued, but using open data tools does not by itself make a government accountable.

  The OECD breaks the field into six categories. They are whole of government coordination, civic engagement and access to information, budget transparency, integrity and the fight against corruption, use of technology, and local development. Most definitions rest on three ideas. Transparency is the visibility and inferability of information. Accountability is answerability and enforceability. Participation is often graded along the "ladder of citizen participation."

  Transparency demands more than a pile of documents. Information must be complete and findable so that readers reach accurate conclusions. It has two principal forms, monitoring transparency and consultation or collaboration transparency. It needs public trust to work. It also rests on three supports: budgets the public can view, an effective way to make and enforce laws, and non-government organizations and independent media that put the information to use. Timeliness, quality, and access and visibility all affect how useful a disclosure is.

  Transparency can exist without accountability, and then the government decides which data counts as valuable enough to release. Pairing the two works better. Agencies must justify why they withhold anything, and strict enforcement must back every transparency rule. Governments have built portals to show critical data, but not everything on them is relevant or easy to reach. Quality, completeness, timeliness and usability are the tests of valuable information.

  The record across regions shows no single formula. Promoting open government in Latin America has increased public trust and reduced corruption. In Asia there has been a push toward right to information laws to build accountability. Yet these measures can fail, and they have to be adjusted for each region. The public must also be aware enough to demand accountability.

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• 5. Laws Around the World

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  Taiwan began its e-government program in 1998. Its Freedom of Government Information Law of 2005 declared that all government information must be made public, including budgets, administrative plans, agency communications and subsidies. The government later launched the open data platform data.gov.tw. The Sunflower Movement of 2014 showed how much Taiwanese citizens value openness, and a white paper from the National Development Council set policy goals for 2020.

  In India, environmental movements demanded the release of information about the damage industrialization was doing, and the Right to Information law followed in 2005. Multilateral agencies that offered aid and loans in exchange for more transparency may also have pushed similar laws elsewhere in southeast Asia. The Philippines issued its Freedom of Information Order in 2016. Under its General Appropriations Act of 2012, every agency must show a "transparency seal" on its website, listing its functions, annual reports, officials, budgets and projects.

  Morocco adopted a new constitution in 2011 with goals meant to guarantee a right to information. Outside support came through the Transparency and Accountability Development Policy Loan, part of a joint program between the European Union and the African Development Bank. In Kenya, important government data is now freely available through the Kenya Open Data Initiative.

  The Netherlands was pushed toward openness in the 1960s by large social unrest and the growing influence of television. It passed access to information legislation in 1980. Its Open Government in Action plan for 2016-2017 set out nine concrete commitments to OECD standards. European law academics argued in 2007 that transparency might be a "new legal principle" emerging "in gestation" within European Union law. In Wales, the government has funded training in Wikipedia skills in secondary schools since 2018 and uses an open licence on its published videos.

  Latin America has treated transparency as part of professionalizing government and fighting corruption since the early 2000s. Mexico, Peru and Panama enacted freedom of information laws in 2002, and every country in the region has since followed. Chile passed its Transparency Law in 2008 and published an open government action plan for 2016-18.

  Iran offers a counterexample. In October 2023 its government publicly opposed a measure for a transparency program across the judiciary, executive and legislative branches. The law never passed after nine months because the judiciary and the state did not consent. Citizens there can make requests through the Iranfoia website.

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• 6. The Case For

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  Supporters credit transparency with creating accountability, which they say reduces corruption, bribery and other malfeasance. Some commentators add that open government spreads information and so produces greater knowledge and societal progress. The OECD and the Open Government Partnership claim it can increase trust in government. The evidence is mixed, and increased transparency has sometimes reduced trust instead.

  Images can change opinion. The United States government has at times forbidden journalists to publish photographs of soldiers' coffins, apparently to manage emotional reactions that might sharpen criticism of ongoing wars. Many people believe such emotionally charged images are valuable information. Some opponents of the death penalty argue in the same spirit that executions should be televised so the public can "see what is being done in their name and with their tax dollars."

  The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace links greater citizen participation to government transparency. Information helps citizens form meaningful conclusions about upcoming legislation and vote on it at the next election.

  Some advocates believe civil society, rather than legislation, is the best route. They point to whistleblowers inside bureaucracies such as Daniel Ellsberg and Paul van Buitenen. They also argue that an independent and inquiring press, printed or electronic, guarantees transparency better than legislative checks and balances.

  The strongest voices today are non-governmental organizations, including Transparency International and the Open Society Institute. They believe governments tend to lapse into secrecy whenever they can. They argue that standards of openness are vital to the prosperity and development of democratic societies.

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• 7. The Case Against

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  In 2014, the political commentator David Frum wrote that transparency reforms had yielded "more lobbying, more expense, more delay, and more indecision." Critics warn of indecision, poor performance and gridlock. Jason Grumet argues that officials cannot deliberate, collaborate and compromise properly when everything they do is being watched.

  A randomized controlled trial with 463 delegates of the National Assembly of Vietnam tested the effect. More transparency in legislative proceedings, such as debates and query transcripts, reduced delegates' activity in query sessions. They avoided anything that could embarrass leaders of the regime.

  Privacy is a second worry, since citizens may face retribution or other negative consequences from information governments provide. In a 2014 article, Teresa Scassa of the University of Ottawa described three challenges. The first is balancing transparency against the protection of personal information. The second is that data protection rules differ between private and public actors, and governments may access information collected by private companies under looser laws. The third is that released "big data" may look anonymous but can be reconnected to individuals by sophisticated algorithms.

  Intelligence gathering must often be clandestine. Frum wrote that "the very same imperatives that drive states to collect information also require them to deny doing so." Some scholars also doubt that the moral certainty behind transparency advocacy is justified, and they note that transparency can support certain neoliberal imperatives.

  The newest complaint comes from election offices. Officials worry that election deniers use excessive Freedom of Information Act requests to disrupt local and county offices. The requests are often unreasonably broad, repetitive or based on misinformation. A Colorado official said the volume amounts to "a denial-of-service attack on local government." Local election officials in Florida and Michigan report spending 25-70% of staff time on public records requests. A review by the Center for Election Innovation & Research found at least 13 states trying to protect election staff. Their methods include public databases that need no staff help and the authority to deny clearly frivolous requests.

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• 8. Data and Networks

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  Open government data, or OGD, means the public publishing of government datasets, usually on platforms such as data.gov.uk or www.data.gov. Proponents say easy access to such data deepens citizen engagement with political institutions. Its principles require data that is complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary and license free. Public and private platforms also let citizens follow budget spending, stimulus spending, lobbyist spending and legislative tracking at local, state and federal levels.

  Software is also changing participation. Some call the integration of tools that let citizens join in governance, particularly in legislation, e-participation. One description calls it the use of information and communication technologies to broaden and deepen political participation by connecting citizens with one another and with their elected representatives.

  A network of organizations now supports the work. The Open Government Partnership was launched in 2011 to help domestic reformers make their governments more open, accountable and responsive. It has grown to 75 participating countries. Code for All is a non-partisan, non-profit international network that believes technology gives citizens a larger role in politics. The Sunlight Foundation was founded in 2006 and used civic tech, open data and policy analysis. It began with a focus on the US Congress but came to influence local, state, federal and international levels.

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