- Freedom of information laws often fall short in practice because overwhelmed civil servants miss abstract or low-salience deadlines.
- A Buenos Aires field experiment redesigned internal notices using behavioral insights—salient deadlines, personalization, social norms, and loss framing.
- Responses clustered at the final deadline and improved attentiveness spilled over to older requests, showing notice design can shift behavior beyond targeted cases.
You file a freedom of information request with your city government. Days go by. A few weeks pass. Eventually, a response arrives — late, if it arrives at all. The natural reaction is to conclude that the bureaucracy simply doesn't care.
But what if that's the wrong diagnosis? What if civil servants, juggling dozens of competing demands, genuinely lose track of deadlines — not out of indifference, but because the notice they receive doesn't make those deadlines feel real or urgent? And what if the fix is not a new law, a bigger budget, or a better-designed incentive scheme — but a better-designed notice?
A simple change in how deadlines are communicated to civil servants can meaningfully shift how they behave. Evidence from a field experiment by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Buenos Aires shows that a behaviorally informed notice—making deadlines more salient and concrete—did not dramatically increase overall on‑time responses to freedom of information requests, but it did change when civil servants responded.
The Gap Between Law and Practice
Freedom of information (FOI) legislation has spread rapidly across Latin America and beyond. The premise is compelling: if citizens can demand information from the state, governments become more transparent and accountable, while public trust in government rises. Over 130 countries have enacted FOI laws, and the region has been an eager participant.
But enacting a law is one thing. Getting civil servants to comply with it — on time, consistently — is another. In many contexts, response rates remain stubbornly low (countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are slower to respond to requests than the global average) and governments tend to reach for familiar tools: more rules, stronger sanctions, or training programs. These approaches have real costs, and they often underestimate a basic truth about how people behave at work. Even motivated civil servants operate under cognitive overload. Deadlines that feel abstract, listed somewhere in a procedural document, are easy to deprioritize until they suddenly aren't.
Redesigning the Notice
In Buenos Aires, when a citizen files an FOI request, the relevant government agency receives an internal notice specifying two deadlines for a response. Under this arrangement, the agency has 15 business days to reply to the request, and an additional 10 business days if it has trouble finding the requested information.
As part of an IDB research project, we redesigned that notice using behavioral economics principles: making the two deadlines more visually salient, personalizing the message, invoking social norms, and framing noncompliance in terms of potential loss rather than mere oversight.
The redesigned notice was randomly assigned to a subset of agencies, letting us compare their behavior with a control group that continued receiving the standard notification.
The main finding is striking — and a little counterintuitive. The redesigned notice did not dramatically increase the share of requests answered on time overall. What it did was sharply concentrate responses around the second and final deadline. Civil servants who received the behaviorally-informed notice were significantly more likely to respond exactly at that cutoff — rather than before it or after it, leading to a 10.7 percentage point increase in responses submitted exactly on the date of the second deadline. The most likely explanation is a strong anchoring effect: by making the deadline vivid and concrete, the notice turned it into a focal point. Some civil servants who might have responded earlier now targeted the deadline; others who might have responded late now met it. The net effect on overall compliance was modest, but the behavioral pattern shifted clearly.
In short: when workers are clearly aware of a deadline, they are much more likely to follow it, people adhere to them — for better or for worse.
The Effects on Civil Servants Spread Further Than Expected
One of the more surprising findings emerged when we looked beyond the treated requests themselves. Because the redesigned notices were launched on a specific date, some agencies in the treatment group still had older pending requests — filed before the intervention began and carrying the old notice format — sitting on their desks when the first redesigned notice arrived.
We also found that the redesigned notice affected more than just the requests it accompanied. Some agencies still had older requests in their backlog when the new notice arrived. Those older requests were more likely to be answered on time if they were close in date to that first redesigned notice. Even a small difference mattered: an older request that was just one business day closer was about four percentage points more likely to be answered within the first 15 business days. In short, the new notice seems to have increased civil servants’ overall attentiveness, helping them respond more quickly to other pending requests as well.
During the same period, some civil servants also participated in training sessions on FOI legislation and the importance of compliance. We observed, without having designed this as a formal treatment, that civil servants who attended training alongside colleagues from both the treatment and control groups showed longer response times on their requests. This is consistent with the possibility that mixing individuals with different levels of deadline salience — some nudged, others not — may have diluted the behavioral effect among those who were nudged. This is not a causal claim, but it is a pattern worth noting for anyone designing reform efforts that combine behavioral interventions with more traditional capacity-building approaches.
What This Means for Transparency Reform
Taken together, these findings carry a few practical messages for governments working to make FOI laws work in practice.
First, how a notice is designed matters as much as what it says. A clear, personalized, and salient reminder of a deadline can change behavior, not because civil servants are unaware of the law, but because the cognitive environment in which they operate makes it easy to let things slide.
Second, behavioral effects can propagate beyond the specific interaction they target. A well-designed nudge may improve an official's overall attentiveness, touching requests they received before the intervention even began.
Third, mixing behavioral and traditional reform strategies requires care. The interaction between nudged and non-nudged individuals in shared settings is something policymakers would be wise to consider when rolling out these tools alongside training programs.
None of this is a reason to abandon structural reform or invest less in government capacity. But it does suggest that the design details of the tools governments already use, including the simple and inexpensive internal notice, deserve far more attention than they typically receive.