Do institutional pressures increase reactive transparency of government? Evidence from a field experiment

This study aims to contribute to the literature on government reactive transparency based on the new institutional theory by testing the influences of regulative pressure and mimetic pressure on government compliance with information requests from the public. Through a randomized field experiment, requests were sent to 198 subdistrict governments in Shanghai, China, with the textual records of the requesting process and follow-up interviews. The findings confirm that regulative pressure can increase government compliance with requests. Further, governments prefer to use three strategies, namely selectivity, bargaining, and avoidance, as alternatives to conformity to institutional pressures for transparency.