Transparency and Corruption: Evidence from India

Freedom of Information (or FOI) laws grant the members of society the ability to monitor government officials directly. Access to official information is now a constitutional right in some 60 countries around the world. Since 2005, India became one of these countries. A few years later, India also became the context in which Leonid Peisakhin and Paul Pinto ran a field experiment to test the effectiveness of distinct methods—including an information request—for helping lower-income individuals secure a ration card, which grants the holder access to subsidized foodstuffs. 

Peisakhin and Pinto recruited nearly 100 participants from a slum in New Delhi. These participants were asked to test four different strategies for obtaining a ration card. Some tried submitting a freedom of information request to support their application for the card. Others tried paying a bribe. Another group of participants presented a letter of support from a local NGO, and, finally, a last set of participants took no action to back their application for a ration card.

The study’s findings suggests that paying speed money is the most effective strategy for lowering the processing time it takes to get access to a ration card. Even more interesting is that the use of the FOI system also proved advantageous for the applicant. Submitting a freedom of information request was the second most effective of the four methods. In fact, this strategy was successful enough that it serves as a compelling alternative to the less respectable tactic of handing a bribe.

Peisakhin and Pinto use their findings to claim that increasing transparency reduces corruption. However, proving experimentally that there is a causal link between higher levels of transparency and corruption reduction would have demanded a different experimental setup. Such a study would require something like the following: (1) generating a large enough sample of similar government offices; (2) randomly assigning some of these offices to adopt greater levels of transparency; and (3) testing whether officials in the offices that are more transparent are less prone to partake in corruption. Nonetheless, this study demonstrates that there are positive externalities to transparency laws.  

A similar study that shows that FOI laws empower the less privileged was run in Mexico in 2006 (The article can be accessed by following this link: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1398025). Lagunes executed a randomized experiment to investigate the effect of income and political connections on the provision of government information. The study’s design involved sending two hundred and forty one information requests to the Mexican federal government. A regular male civilian with a very common last name sent half of the requests. The other half were sent by a male that clearly signaled having wealth and political connections. The study’s results show that, overall, someone signaling wealth and political clout receives almost equal service provision compared to an average citizen. 

Citation: L. Peisakhin & P. Pinto, "Is Transparency an Effective Anti-Corruption Strategy? Evidence form a Field Experiment in India." Regulation & Governance, 4(3): 261-280, 2010