Accountability in time: evolution and expertise in participatory institutions

How do participatory institutions change over time? While previous research has focused on exogenous changes such as legal reform or leadership replacement, institutions also evolve endogenously through processes of behavioral and compositional change, on the parts of citizen claimants and government officials. These processes can gradually reshape institutions to become more responsive to either expert or non-expert claimants—which we refer to as brokered and grassroots models of social accountability. In the context of Mexico’s access-to-information system, we analyze nearly two million information requests and responses filed between 2003 and 2019, using new machine-learning based measures. We find evidence of claimants becoming more sophisticated over time and officials becoming more responsive to these expert claimants, both consistent with a brokered accountability model. Both quantitative and qualitative evidence reveal mechanisms of behavioral and compositional change by citizen claimants and government agents.