Why do politicians in high-corruption countries adopt transparency and anti-corruption policies (TACPs) such as freedom-of-information laws and public asset disclosure rules that risk exposing their own wrongdoing, and what determines whether these policies become durably implemented? Schnell (2017) argued, from the Romanian cases of freedom of information and asset disclosure, that tainted decision makers adopt TACPs to signal integrity while underestimating enforcement consequences, and that sustained political competition keeps corruption on the public agenda, shifting attention from adoption to implementation and raising compliance. The open problem is to determine, through comparative and longitudinal evidence, the conditions and causal pathways under which initially symbolic TACPs convert into durable institutional compliance versus enduring window dressing or later rollback: the dynamics of agenda status that make TACPs salient, the institutional configurations that sustain compliance when public attention fades, and how the signaling-plus-miscalculation-feedback mechanism generalizes across regime types, baseline institutional strength, and external conditionality.

Background

Transparency and anti-corruption policies (TACPs) are rules that open government information to scrutiny — chief among them freedom-of-information acts (FOI laws, also called access-to-information laws), which let citizens request government documents, and public asset disclosure rules, which require officials to reveal their wealth. A long-standing puzzle is why officeholders who benefit from opacity adopt such self-constraining rules. Three families of explanations dominate the literature: symbolic adoption or 'window dressing' (laws are passed for reputational gain but never meant to be enforced), bottom-up monitoring (laws empower journalists and citizens to police officials), and an insurance motive (politicians in uncertain electoral competition adopt binding transparency rules so that, if they lose office, they retain access to information and protection against prosecutorial successors). Berliner and Erlich (2015) found the strongest support for the insurance motive in Mexican states' adoption of access-to-information laws, and Berliner (2016) showed that local political competition can generate endogenous compliance incentives even where state capacity is weak, as in South African municipalities. Schnell (2017) studied Romania — a high-corruption democracy under European Union accession conditionality — and proposed a different account, drawn from agenda-setting theory (the study of how problems rise and fall on the public and political agenda) and ideas of cheap talk versus credible commitment in signaling: decision makers adopt TACPs both because they want to signal integrity and because they miscalculate, assuming they can control implementation and therefore discounting the cost of damaging revelations. In her mechanism, sustained political competition keeps corruption and lack of transparency on the agenda (high 'agenda status'), which shifts attention from policy adoption to implementation and, through a policy-feedback dynamic (the reform's own consequences reshaping actors' incentives), can ratchet compliance upward — so a signal intended to be cheap becomes costly. This account leaves open how the process starts, what sustains it, and where it fails: whether TACPs reach and hold the agenda is unexplained; whether compliance survives the fading of public attention depends on institutional configurations (such as bureaucratic professionalism, judicial independence, or insulated oversight agencies) that were not systematically compared; and whether the miscalculation-plus-feedback mechanism travels beyond a high-corruption democracy like Romania to other regime types, baselines of institutional strength, or forms of external conditionality (e.g., EU monitoring) is unknown. Adjacent findings sharpen the stakes: compliance with such laws is often local and uneven (Michener and Nichter, 2022), FOI laws can even reshape bureaucratic hiring (Batista and Michener, 2024), China's open-government regulation was later constricted through its own courts (Kim et al., 2022), and populist government involvement has contingent effects on the strength of FOI laws across Europe (Di Mascio et al., 2026) — but these single-case or single-dimension results do not add up to a general account of when symbolic reform becomes durable versus hollow or reversed.

Problem Statement

Under what conditions do transparency and anti-corruption policies (TACPs), once adopted, become durably implemented institutions rather than enduring window dressing or targets of later rollback? This comprises three linked components: (1) the agenda dynamics of TACPs — under what conditions transparency and corruption emerge on the public and political agenda in the first place, and what determines the duration and intensity of public attention (agenda status); (2) the compliance question — when public attention subsides, which institutional configurations (e.g., levels of bureaucratic professionalism, judicial independence, or insulation of oversight agencies) suffice to maintain compliance despite weakened agenda status; (3) generalizability — how the signaling-plus-miscalculation-feedback mechanism identified in the Romanian cases travels beyond high-corruption democracies, i.e., how variations in regime type, baseline institutional strength, and external conditionality alter the relative prevalence of the signaling, monitoring, and insurance motives for adoption and, through that, whether the mechanism yields durable compliance rather than window dressing or rollback. These three components are jointly required.

References

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