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Can Social Pressure Foster Responsiveness? An Open Records Field Experiment with Mayoral Offices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2020

Bryant J. Moy
Bryant J. Moy*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Washington University, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO63130
*
Corresponding author. Email: bryant.moy@wustl.edu
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Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which social pressures can foster greater responsiveness among public officials. I conduct a non-deceptive field experiment on 1400 city executives across all 50 states and measure their level of responsiveness to open records requests. I use two messages to prime social pressure. The first treatment centers on the norm and duty to be responsive to the public’s request for transparency. The second treatment is grounded in the peer effect literature, which suggests that individuals change their behavior in the face of potential social sanctioning and accountability. I find no evidence that mayors are affected by priming the officials’ duty to the public. The mayors who received the peer effects prime were 6–8 percentage points less likely to respond, which suggests a “backfire effect.” This paper contributes to the growing responsiveness literature on the local level and the potential detrimental impact of priming peer effects.

Keywords

social pressurepublic officialsopen records
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 117 - 127
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

I thank Betsy Sinclair, Andrew Reeves, Jacob Montgomery, Margit Tavits, and the reviewers for their helpful comments. The data and code required to replicate the analysis in the article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EHVA7Y (Moy, 2020). To protect the anonymity of the public officials who participated in the experiment, covariates are removed from the replication data. The editorial office was able to reproduce the findings from the restricted data. The author declares no conflicts of interest.

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