Accountability in Time: Evolution and Expertise in Participatory Institutions

abstract: How do participatory institutions change over time? Previous research has focused on exogenous changes, such as legal reform or leadership replacement. But institutions also evolve endogenously, through processes of behavioral and compositional change on the part of citizen claimants and government officials. These processes can gradually reshape institutions to become more responsive to either expert or nonexpert claimants. The authors refer to such processes as brokered and grassroots models of social accountability. In the context of Mexico’s access-to-information system, the authors employ new machine-learning-generated measures to analyze nearly two million information requests and responses filed between 2003 and 2019. They find evidence that shows claimants becoming more sophisticated over time, and officials becoming more responsive to these expert claimants—both findings consistent with a brokered accountability model. Quantitative and qualitative evidence reveals mechanisms of behavioral and compositional change by citizen claimants and government agents.