Differences in Open Government Information among Departments with Different Responsibilities

Abstract

ABSTRACTAlthough open government information awareness has enhanced since China implemented the Open Government Information Regulation, the complaints about the information disclosure work also increased. Previous research has ignored the impact of the department's responsibilities on information disclosure, which are essential as some departments handle information that should not be disclosed. From this standpoint, this paper is the first to analyze the differences in departments' open government information performance from their annual information openness reports. Variance and correlation analysis show that the potential harm of disclosure to third parties' legitimate rights and interests, the availability of relevant information, and duplicate requests can explain their differences in government information disclosure on request. Besides, this paper calls for an elastic criterion for openness evaluation and finds that the benchmark effect in previous research does not apply to departments with different responsibilities.