Insight on Oversight: The Role of Freedom of Information Oversight Bodies Under Populist Rule

Democracies worldwide are confronted with the rise of populist parties, which has sparked a debate about what happens to public administration when populists come to power (Peters and Pierre 2019; Bauer et al 2021; Bauer 2023). So far most of research has centered on identifying populist strategies aiming at reforming the civil service – most of the time by renouncing liberal values, strengthening hierarchy and excessively politicizing recruitment and career advancement (Bauer and Becker 2020). Much less attention has been directed at how populist leaders approach government transparency (Michener 2023). In particular, the literature on populism and public administration has so far neglected to assess the impact of populist parties on the configuration of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, which encourage citizens’ and CSOs’ watchdog function by providing them with a legal tool for holding the government accountable for their actions. To date, most countries across the globe have established and continuously renewed FOI laws, with well over half of these law adoptions taking place over the last three decades. The global spread of FOI laws reflects the growth of international normative principles supported by international multilateral initiatives and actors. However, some FOI laws make stronger commitment to these international normative principles in terms of their scope, procedures, sanctions and other dimensions of legal design. Against this backdrop, our paper empirically examines whether the presence in representative institutions of populist parties has any effect on the legal design of a key dimension of FOI laws, namely oversight bodies (Holsen and Pasquier 2019). FOI laws are essentially useless if there is no practical means of enforcing them. The main advantage of giving enforcement responsibility to an oversight body (an ombudsman or information commissioner) is that appealing to such a body is not as time-consuming, costly, or intimidating for requesters when compared to going to court. In our quantitative analysis, the dependent variable – the de jure strength of FOI oversight body – is measured through original data, based on the coding of legal frameworks for accessing information in 12 European Union countries in the period 2000-2022. The in-depth exploratory case study analysis allows us to assess the effect of multiple factors on the institutional design of FOI oversight bodies, including the role of political competition in motivating populist actors to undermine oversight of FOI enforcement.