Case Study Ciudadano Inteligente

In 2009 Chile enacted a legislation to guarantee citizen´s access to public information. However, the response rate to information requests -especially at the municipal level- is still very low. Pro-transparency organizations such as Ciudadano Inteligente can play an important role at increasing public organization compliance with citizen´s right to information. Through monitoring actions and publicly disseminating information, they can increase pubic organizations´ expected (political) cost of not responding to a request. To test that hypothesis we conduct an experiment in which the identity of who is submitting an information request is randomly assigned between municipalities in Chile. Municipalities in the treatment group received a request for information from Ciudadano Inteligente, while municipalities in the control group received the exactly same request from a regular individual. We find that compared to the control group the requests submitted by Ciudadano Inteligente had a higher respond rate, but the effect is circumscribed to the municipalities that lack system and technological support to deal with citizen´s demand for information.