Does openness create more openness or provoke resistance?' Transparency has become a central tenet of what constitutes good governance. It is also a key part of citizens’ democratic expectations. However, there may be reasons why public authorities do not live up to the increasingly high standards expected of them, which may have to do with the habits of secrecy, limited time to do more than minimal adherence to procedures. Freedom of Information requests may improve accountability or they may cause public authorities to become more resistant to outside requests. To test for the impact of Freedom of Information requests this paper reports the result of a field experiment carried out in the early part of 2014 randomising requests to 10,000 parish councils, the lowest democratic unit in England with the treatments of a FOI request or an information request as well a control group.
