How agency resources matter to government reactive transparency: Evidence from freedom of information requests in China

Studies of reactive transparency argue that organizational resources are crucial for government responses to freedom of information requests but ignore the fact that governments may be reluctant to actively allocate resources because of the information control preference of the bureaucracy. Combining the resource-based view with the inherent preference for bureaucracy, this study examines the influence of organizational resources on multifaceted dimensions of reactive transparency by sending freedom of information requests to 949 provincial agencies in China. The analysis of multilevel logistic and ordinal logistic regressions of response results revealed that platform capacity significantly increased agency replies and compliance with requests, financial capacity significantly increased the likelihood of agencies providing additional information, and data availability is significantly associated with agency replies. Additionally, a significant relationship between agency orientation and compliance was confirmed. These findings enrich our understanding of the crucial role of various organizational resources in explaining the practice of developing reactive transparency.