Determinants of Access to Information Requests: Analysis of the Municipalities of the Los Ríos Region, Chile

Abstract

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests have become a daily task for officials at all levels of government, thanks to the emergence of access to information laws in the last decade. However, we know little about variables that can explain why one municipality receives more applications than another. Starting from theoretical premises about transparency and access to public information, this article seeks to identify variables associated with the number of FOI requests to a municipality. To do this, a quantitative analysis is carried out, contrasting the number of FOI requests carried out in municipalities in the Los Ríos Region (Chile) with data on social, political, and administrative variables of these communes for eight consecutive years. The results indicate that compliance with active transparency requirements, political participation, and fiscal autonomy are associated with the number of information requests made to the municipalities studied. These results would be a first approach to the determinants of FOI requests at the municipal level and allow us to point out new lines of research for the future.