Daniel Berliner and Aaron Erlich. “Competing for Transparency: Political Competition and Institutional Reform in Mexican States.” American Political Science Review, vol. 109, no. 01,2015, pp. 110–28.
Why do political actors undertake reforms that constrain their own discretion? We
argue that uncertainty generated by political competition is a major driver of such reforms,
and test this argument using subnational data on Mexican states' adoption of state-level
access to information (ATI) laws. Examining data from 31 Mexican states plus the Federal
District, we find that more politically competitive states passed ATI laws more rapidly, even
taking into account the party in power, levels of corruption, civil society, and other factors. ...