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What shapes attitudes towards procedural rules that constrain executive power? This letter argues that procedural values are contextual: A function of who is in power. Supporters of those in power prefer fewer procedural constraints, while opposition supporters prefer greater. This study reports the results of a unique test using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. Respondents were asked, in both pre- and post-election waves, if they thought it should be 'easier or harder for the president to keep documents secret from the public'. The panel design makes it possible to track individual changes following the shift in political context. The results show evidence of a partisan 'flip' in attitudes following the election, with Republicans becoming less likely – and Democrats more likely – to prefer additional constraints on presidential secrecy. However, this partisan 'flip' is present only among higher political knowledge respondents.

Institutional reforms often face challenges of poor compliance and implementation at the local level. I analyze these in a context where weak state capacity and limited enforcement make widespread compliance unlikely. South Africa's 2000 Promotion of Access to Information Act tasked the South African Human Rights Commission with monitoring and promoting compliance, but with limited resources and no authority to sanction. I argue that local political competition can generate endogenous incentives for compliance, even under conditions of weak capacity and limited external enforcement. Using data on 234 South African municipalities over 10 years, I find higher levels of compliance among more politically competitive municipalities. The results are not simply a function of differences between African National Congress–governed municipalities and others, and are robust to numerous controls for different forms of local state capacity.

1\. Introduction 5 2\. The Global Spread of the Freedom of Information 7 3\. The Diffusion of Policy Design 9 3.1 Uncertainty and Emulation 9 3.2 Illustrative Evidence 10 4\. A Quantitative Approach to Policy Design and Policy Similarity 14 4.1 Measuring the Design of FOI Laws 14 4.2 Modeling Policy Similarity among Country-Pairs 15 5\. Model Results 17 5.1 Regional Emulation 17 5.2 Alternative Diffusion Mechanisms 18 6\. Conclusion 23 Bibliography 25 ; How do countries make policy in an uncertain world? Do policymakers look inward, rationally designing policies to fit domestic interests, ideas, and institutions? Or do they look outward, imitating policy elements from other countries? And if the latter, where do they look? Focusing on the specific policy area of Freedom of Information laws, I argue that regional emulation plays an important role in shaping policy design. Policymakers face substantial uncertainty over the consequences of different design choices, and so emulate other countries as policy models. I further argue that, due to availability bias, countries in the same region serve as the most important such models. After reviewing numerous examples of such emulation, I model the policy similarity between 4,096 pairs of countries, and find that countries in the same region, or more geographically proximate, tend to have more similar laws than other country-pairs. These results are robust to different categorizations of region, fixed effects capturing country-specific features, and testing against alternative forms of emulation as well as alternative diffusion mechanisms of competition, coercion, conditionality, and learning. This approach also highlights the diffusion of policy design, as opposed to adoption, as an important future direction for policy diffusion research.

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. The fine-grained nature of our data, reflecting the staggered timing of elections, inauguration dates, and dates of passage, allows us to distinguish between different theoretical mechanisms. We find the greatest evidence in favor of an insurance mechanism, by which incumbent parties who face uncertainty over future political control seek to ensure access to government information, and means of monitoring incumbents, in the future in case they lose power.

How might domestic regulatory institutions influence the adoption of global private regimes? We focus on the ISO 9001 and 14001 certification standards, which obligate firms to establish quality and environmental management systems. Previous research highlights the roles of international commercial audiences and national regulatory pressures as unconditional drivers of adoption. However, we argue that domestic regulatory institutions condition their effects-in opposite directions. Where regulatory institutions function well, firms facing high levels of regulatory pressure are more likely to seek ISO certification, but firms facing pressures from international audiences are less likely to do so. In contrast, weak regulatory institutions make export-oriented and foreign-owned firms more likely to seek ISO certification, but render firms facing high levels of regulatory pressure less likely to do so. We find support for our claims using firm-level data from 10,000 firms in 30 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Adapted from the source document.