OF INFORMATION LAW

By Paul Lagunes[25]

Freedom of information laws empower the interested parties to access all documents held by the government with only a few and stated exceptions. These laws are, thus, widely believed to strengthen transparency and promote accountability. The existence of a law, however, does not guarantee its enforcement.

As Susan Rose-Ackerman explains, “Law […] will be largely irrelevant if the rules are not embedded in an institutional and organizational structure that favors compliance” (Rose-Ackerman 2004 183). This is particularly true for countries with entrenched political and economic inequalities and widespread corruption. In such countries there is scarce rule of law, which is generally understood as the subordination of all of society to the requirements of enacted legislation (Shapiro 1994; von Hayek Keohane 2003 283; Barros 2003; Ferejohn and Pasquino 2003). The question, thus, is: In a developing and recently democratized country, how resilient are political and economic inequalities? Do they translate into unequal access to public information even after the country has adopted a freedom of information law?

Existing research would suggest that it does, for it is often thought that wealth can enable those with comparatively more resources to influence government (Hellman and Kaufman 2002 2; Kaufmann 1997 118; Glaeser, Scheinkman and Shleifer 2003 22; de Ferranti et al. 2004 22).

In fact, in Macedonia, civilians requesting government information that signaled to be members of a vulnerable racial, ethnic, religious, or socio-economic group were routinely less likely to receive compliant responses from the government (Open Society Justice Initiative 2006 58). The present research project explores whether Mexican government officials also practice this sort of differential treatment.