By Seulki Lee-Geiller, Caterina Santoro, Mohsan Ali & Yannis Charalabidis
Open government has become a prominent global policy agenda over the past decade, associated with ideals of transparency, accountability, and civic participation. Yet its rise has coincided with a period of democratic backsliding in many countries. This article, Uncovering Motivations Behind Open Government Policy: A Policy Diffusion Approach, asks a deceptively simple question: why do governments commit to open government reforms amid growing concerns over democratic backsliding?
Open government in an era of democratic decline
Open government has been widely promoted through international initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which requires participating countries to develop action plans and commit to reforms including fiscal transparency, freedom of information, and citizen engagement. Governments across diverse political systems have adopted these commitments, helping to institutionalise open government as a global policy model.
At the same time, many observers point to broader patterns of democratic erosion, including weakening institutional checks and shrinking civic space. This creates an apparent puzzle. If democratic institutions are under strain in many contexts, what explains governments’ willingness to publicly embrace openness and transparency initiatives?
Existing research provides only partial answers. Studies of policy diffusion often explain the spread of institutional models by examining patterns of adoption across countries. Meanwhile, research on open government tends to focus on the design or outcomes of reforms rather than the motivations governments themselves articulate. As the authors suggest, this leaves an important gap in understanding why governments say they adopt these policies.
Motivations for adopting open government may range from instrumental considerations, such as economic benefits, to the simple mimicry of reforms implemented by other countries. These motivations can be observed by examining how states justify such reforms at the global level. However, existing literature provides limited tools for analysing these motivations across large numbers of countries. Recent methodological innovations based on natural language processing share a similar limitation, as they struggle to capture motivations and, more broadly, the meanings articulated in text.
Analysing motivations through policy discourse
To explore this question and address a theoretical and methodological gap, the article develops an iterative human–artificial intelligence natural language processing approach to analyse how governments justify open government commitments in official policy documents. The study examines action plans and policy documents produced by 75 member countries of the Open Government Partnership.
Rather than inferring motivations indirectly from adoption patterns, the analysis focuses on the language governments use to frame their reforms. By combining machine-assisted text analysis with qualitative coding, the approach identifies the different motivations governments articulate when presenting open government commitments.
These include instrumental goals such as improving administrative efficiency, normative commitments to democratic principles, and efforts to enhance international reputation and legitimacy. Importantly, countries frequently pursue these objectives simultaneously, reflecting multiple motivations.
Diffusion, signalling, reform, and a scalable approach to policy documents analysis
By examining how governments justify open government reforms, the article highlights how policy adoption can serve multiple purposes. In some cases, commitments to openness may reflect genuine reform ambitions. In others, they may function more symbolically, signalling alignment with internationally valued governance norms.
For scholars of policy diffusion, the findings suggest that analysing policy discourse can provide additional insight into how and why policy models spread. Understanding how governments frame commitments to openness may therefore help clarify what these reforms represent—and how far they translate into meaningful institutional change.
Finally, the innovative method presented by the authors also provides a scalable tool for analysing policy documents that can be applied in other contexts.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Lee-Geiller, S., Santoro, C., Ali, M., & Charalabidis, Y. (2026). Uncovering motivations behind open government policy: a policy diffusion approach. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2026) from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2026D000000090
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