Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the period 1998?2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of...

This paper studies the policy impact of civil service regulations, exploiting reforms undertaken by US state governments throughout the twentieth century. These reforms replaced political patronage with a civil service recruited based on merit and protected from politics. I find that state...

Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the period 1998–2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of...

Based on the experiences of Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia, the paper proposes a general analytical framework for participatory mechanisms. The analysis is oriented to detect the incentives in each system and the ethics and behavior sustaining them. It investigates about the sustainability of...

This study, based on data about internet available functionalities of Portuguese municipalities, determines, using computational facilities supported by a data base and a query language, and analyzes a large number of recommendations in order to provide a better service to user. It concludes...

The focus of this paper is on how organizational change within medical research evolves and is influenced by different types of institutions at different geographical levels, as well as what characteristics of the key individuals are important in enacting institutional opportunities and...