The Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy has received a grant from the University of Washington’s Civic Health Initiative to study public records requests and their impact on requesters, public agencies, and democratic governance.
The purpose of these research awards is to “support UW faculty members in developing new research innovations for activities and projects that seek to revitalize civic health and bolster democratic institutions across the country.”
The project will be led by Patricia Moy, Matthew Powers and Adrienne Russell. The Washington Coalition for Open Government will join the CJMD as a “community partner” on the project.
Below is a summary of the project.
Journalists, Transparency, and Democratic Governance
Passed in the 1960s and 70s, open-records laws in the United States were crafted to enable public oversight of government activities, under the assumption that most users would be journalists. Today, at both federal and state levels, the number of requests has skyrocketed – yet news organizations constitute fewer than five percent of public-records requesters.
To better understand this disconnect, our study examines the nature of public-records requests and their impact on requesters, public agencies, and democratic governance. We pose three specific research questions: Who uses public-records requests? For what ends? And with what consequences for democratic oversight? In order to answer these questions, we will: (1) request and analyze records requests to the Washington State Department of Ecology; (2) conduct interviews with its public-records officers and managers as well as the journalists who made the requests; and (3) analyze news articles based on these requests. Answering these questions is critical to renewing and strengthening open-records laws so they better serve their original goal: enabling journalists and other stakeholders to exercise democratic oversight in the public interest.
Our findings should inform efforts by our community partner, the Washington Coalition of Open Government, that allow systems to better serve journalists as well as advocates and civil-society groups working in the public interest. In doing so, it will contribute to the renovation of a key measure whose aim is to make government agencies more responsive to public oversight and input.