Populism, Press Freedom, and Transparency: Gauging the Experience of Latin American Journalists with Access to Information Laws

Over the past three decades, close to 140 countries worldwide – including 18 in Latin America – have enacted access to information (ATI) laws. Recent increases in populism, authoritarianism, and harassment of the press, however, have been accompanied by rollbacks in public transparency and ATI, raising questions about the factors shaping journalists’ use and perceptions of ATI laws and government transparency more generally. In one of the largest cross-national ATI surveys to date, we draw on responses from 678 journalists across Latin America to examine the influence of macro-level factors – including populist leadership, press freedom, and characteristics of ATI laws – on journalists’ experiences with information access. Our findings show that populist leadership has significantly negative effects on ATI use and experience, in line with other evaluations. However, our findings reveal several unexpected results, including the null effect of the age and legal strength of ATI laws on usage and the statistically significant relationship between negative press freedom and increased ATI use. Overall, our results show that two-thirds of our sample make use of information access laws. And despite negative experiences, journalists continue to file information requests, and the more requests they file, the more positive their assessment of government transparency. Our study thus suggests that ATI laws provide substantially positive returns to both journalists and governments.