Impact of Effective Right to Information on Corruption

Abstract

Right to information (RTI) laws have been passed by over a hundred countries in the last four to five decades, allowing citizens in these countries to access government held information including policies, budgets and expenditures. Right to information, if truly effective, mandates disclosure that leads to open public assessment of governance leading to accountability with a deterring effect against corrupt practice. Countries are ranked on the framework of their RTI laws as well as on domestic corruption perception through international grading systems called ‘RTI-rating’ and ‘Corruption Perceptions Index’ respectively. A careful comparison between rankings of RTI laws of countries and their scores/ranks in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) reveals an inverse relationship between the two i.e. countries with the higher ranked RTI laws have a worse ranking in CPI than countries with lower rated RTI laws. This paper hypothesizes that it is ultimately the institutional environment of a country that affords even basic RTI laws the capacity to be an effective force against corruption. A model is created where it is tested whether ‘effective right to information’ which actually prevails on the ground (and not merely provided in the law), and the ‘institutional quality’ (IQ) of countries mediate each other’s influence when they impact corruption. A set of panel data consisting of a period of 15 years is used for estimations. It is found that both the channels hold. The key finding is that ‘institutional quality’ lends greater power to ‘effective right to information’, amplifying its impact on corruption, as opposed to the other way round. This also explains the seemingly paradoxical positions of countries on the RTI and CPI rankings.