Daniel Berliner
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628743 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Berliner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Berliner |
| SIGNATURE | BERLINER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0285-0215 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 473 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Information Processing in Participatory Institutions
Participatory institutions often aim to yield information useful to policymakers, whether about public preferences, problems, or solutions. But how can large numbers of public contributions be processed into interpretable and actionable information outputs? As theorists and practitioners increasingly call for participatory institutions to operate at larger scales, often enabled by new technologies, this challenge only becomes more important. This…
Accountability in Time
How do participatory institutions change over time? Previous research has focused on exogenous changes, such as legal reform or leadership replacement. But institutions also evolve endogenously, through processes of behavioral and compositional change on the part of citizen claimants and government officials. These processes can gradually reshape institutions to become more responsive to either expert or nonexpert claimants. The authors refer to …
Do voters differentially punish transnational corruption
A large literature studies whether, and under what circumstances, voters will electorally punish corrupt politicians. Yet this literature has to date neglected the empirical prevalence of transnational dimensions to real‐world corruption allegations, even as corruption studies undergo a ‘transnational turn’. We use a survey experiment in the United Kingdom in 2020 to investigate whether voters differentially punish politicians associated with tra…
Audits for Accountability
Theories of retrospective accountability assume that voters punish poor governance and reward improvements, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We extend this research to a new context, assessing the impact of audits on electoral outcomes in South African municipalities. Our novel identification strategy focuses on by-elections triggered by deaths in office of local councilors and compares those taking place before and after audit results are a…
Process effects of multistakeholder institutions
How does membership in transnational multistakeholder institutions shape states' domestic governance? We complement traditional compliance‐based approaches by developing a process model, focusing on the independent effects of processes associated with institutional membership, but separate from commitments and compliance themselves. These effects can be driven by iterative and participatory institutional features, which are increasingly prevalent…
Multi-Label Prediction for Political Text-as-Data
Political scientists increasingly use supervised machine learning to code multiple relevant labels from a single set of texts. The current “best practice” of individually applying supervised machine learning to each label ignores information on inter-label association(s), and is likely to under-perform as a result. We introduce multi-label prediction as a solution to this problem. After reviewing the multi-label prediction framework, we apply it …
Partisan Context and Procedural Values
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 w…
Measuring Human Rights Abuse from Access to Information Requests
Existing measures of human rights abuses are often only available at the country-year level. Several more fine-grained measures exhibit spatio-temporal inaccuracies or reporting biases due to the primary sources upon which they rely. To address these challenges, and to increase the diversity of available human rights measures more generally, this study provides the first quantitative effort to measure human rights abuses from textual records of c…
The Political Logic of Government Disclosure
When citizens ask questions, how does their government answer? Requests for government information confront officials with incentives both for and against disclosure. We argue that officials seek to manage political risks in ways that favor requests from government-aligned regions. We study responsiveness in the context of Mexico's access-to-information law, using publicly available data from several hundred thousand information requests filed wi…
Media Attention and Bureaucratic Responsiveness
How does media attention shape bureaucratic behavior? We answer this question using novel data from the Mexican federal government. We first develop a new indicator for periods of anomalously heightened media attention, based on 150,000 news articles pertaining to 22 Mexican government ministries and agencies, and qualitatively categorize their themes. We then evaluate government responsiveness using administrative data on roughly 500,000 request…
The diversity of repression
Tactical repertoires of mobilization and repression play an essential role in understanding dynamics of political violence, yet existing quantitative approaches focus primarily on intensities or counts of repressive actions. We focus instead on the diversity of repression, and demonstrate a novel method of measuring repertoires of state repression using event data. We show that more repressive states are likely to employ more diverse repertoires …
Learning from Our Mistakes
In public administration today, many new reform ideas mingle, offering new diagnoses of governmental problems and courses of action. But scholars have highlighted reasons why we should doubt the optimistic claims of reformists. A new set of policy tools called “open government” arrived nearly a decade ago, and scholars have not yet explained its origins or prospects as specific approach to management reform. In this article, we address this lacun…
When does open government shut? Predicting government responses to citizen information requests
Methods for the analysis of “big data” on citizen‐government interactions are necessary for theoretical assessments of bureaucratic responsiveness. Such big data methods also stand to benefit practitioners' abilities to monitor and improve these emerging transparency mechanisms. We consider supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) as a potential method for these purposes. To this end, we use sLDA to examine the Mexican government's (non)resp…
What information do citizens want? Evidence from one million information requests in Mexico
The Politics of Scrutiny in Human Rights Monitoring
Human rights monitoring reports play important roles both in the international human rights regime and in productions of human rights data. However, human rights reports are produced by organizations subject to formal and informal pressures that may influence the topics considered salient for attention and scrutiny. We study this potential using structural topic models (STMs), a method used for identifying the latent topical dimensions of texts a…
Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act
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 politi…
Governing Global Supply Chains
Research over the past decade has made considerable progress toward achieving a holistic understanding of the myriad actors, interests, and relationships shaping labor rights in global supply chains, but numerous obstacles remain to building a more cumulative research program. In this essay we outline two major challenges and several fruitful directions forward. First, we review the different outcomes of interest in research on labor rights and h…
Building Capacity, Building Rights? State Capacity and Labor Rights in Developing Countries
Bluewashing” the Firm? Voluntary Regulations, Program Design, and Member Compliance with the United Nations Global Compact
Voluntary programs have emerged as important instruments of public policy.We explore whether programs lacking monitoring and enforcement mechanisms can curb participants' shirking with program obligations.Incentive-based approaches to policy see monitoring and enforcement as essential to curb shirking, while norm-based approaches view social mechanisms such as norms and learning as sufficient to serve this purpose.The United Nations Global Compac…
Competing for Transparency
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 tak…
The Political Origins of Transparency
Transparency has been hailed as the key to better governance, yet political actors have many reasons to resist transparency. This article studies one prominent transparency policy, Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, which have been passed by over 80 countries. By institutionalizing transparency, FOI laws increase the costs for political actors to use public office—and public information—for private gain. Why have so many states passed FOI laws de…
Public Authority and Private Rules
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 th…
Signaling Environmental Stewardship in the Shadow of Weak Governance
This article examines how the quality of domestic regulatory institutions shapes the role of global economic networks in the cross-national diffusion of private or voluntary programs embodying environmental norms and practices. We focus on ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world, which encourages participating firms to adopt environmental stewardship policies…
From norms to programs
Norms shape policy when they get translated into concrete programs. What if a widely shared norm gets translated into a weak program? How might this influence the program's legitimacy? We examine these issues in the context of the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary program that embodies the widely shared norm of corporate responsibility. While both international intergovernmental organization (IGO) and international non‐governmental organ…
The Political Origins of Transparency
Transparency has been hailed as the key to better governance, yet political actors have many reasons to resist transparency. This article studies one prominent transparency policy, Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, which have been passed by over 80 countries. By institutionalizing transparency, FOI laws increase the costs for political actors to use public office—and public information—for private gain. Why have so many states passed FOI laws de…
Bluewashing” the Firm? Voluntary Regulations, Program Design, and Member Compliance with the United Nations Global Compact
Voluntary programs have emerged as important instruments of public policy.We explore whether programs lacking monitoring and enforcement mechanisms can curb participants' shirking with program obligations.Incentive-based approaches to policy see monitoring and enforcement as essential to curb shirking, while norm-based approaches view social mechanisms such as norms and learning as sufficient to serve this purpose.The United Nations Global Compac…
Competing for Transparency
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 tak…
The Politics of Scrutiny in Human Rights Monitoring
Human rights monitoring reports play important roles both in the international human rights regime and in productions of human rights data. However, human rights reports are produced by organizations subject to formal and informal pressures that may influence the topics considered salient for attention and scrutiny. We study this potential using structural topic models (STMs), a method used for identifying the latent topical dimensions of texts a…
Building Capacity, Building Rights? State Capacity and Labor Rights in Developing Countries
Public Authority and Private Rules
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 th…
Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act
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 politi…
Signaling Environmental Stewardship in the Shadow of Weak Governance
This article examines how the quality of domestic regulatory institutions shapes the role of global economic networks in the cross-national diffusion of private or voluntary programs embodying environmental norms and practices. We focus on ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world, which encourages participating firms to adopt environmental stewardship policies…
From norms to programs
Norms shape policy when they get translated into concrete programs. What if a widely shared norm gets translated into a weak program? How might this influence the program's legitimacy? We examine these issues in the context of the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary program that embodies the widely shared norm of corporate responsibility. While both international intergovernmental organization (IGO) and international non‐governmental organ…
Media Attention and Bureaucratic Responsiveness
How does media attention shape bureaucratic behavior? We answer this question using novel data from the Mexican federal government. We first develop a new indicator for periods of anomalously heightened media attention, based on 150,000 news articles pertaining to 22 Mexican government ministries and agencies, and qualitatively categorize their themes. We then evaluate government responsiveness using administrative data on roughly 500,000 request…
The Political Logic of Government Disclosure
When citizens ask questions, how does their government answer? Requests for government information confront officials with incentives both for and against disclosure. We argue that officials seek to manage political risks in ways that favor requests from government-aligned regions. We study responsiveness in the context of Mexico's access-to-information law, using publicly available data from several hundred thousand information requests filed wi…
What information do citizens want? Evidence from one million information requests in Mexico
When does open government shut? Predicting government responses to citizen information requests
Methods for the analysis of “big data” on citizen‐government interactions are necessary for theoretical assessments of bureaucratic responsiveness. Such big data methods also stand to benefit practitioners' abilities to monitor and improve these emerging transparency mechanisms. We consider supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) as a potential method for these purposes. To this end, we use sLDA to examine the Mexican government's (non)resp…
Governing Global Supply Chains
Research over the past decade has made considerable progress toward achieving a holistic understanding of the myriad actors, interests, and relationships shaping labor rights in global supply chains, but numerous obstacles remain to building a more cumulative research program. In this essay we outline two major challenges and several fruitful directions forward. First, we review the different outcomes of interest in research on labor rights and h…
Partisan Context and Procedural Values
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 w…
Audits for Accountability
Theories of retrospective accountability assume that voters punish poor governance and reward improvements, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We extend this research to a new context, assessing the impact of audits on electoral outcomes in South African municipalities. Our novel identification strategy focuses on by-elections triggered by deaths in office of local councilors and compares those taking place before and after audit results are a…
Process effects of multistakeholder institutions
How does membership in transnational multistakeholder institutions shape states' domestic governance? We complement traditional compliance‐based approaches by developing a process model, focusing on the independent effects of processes associated with institutional membership, but separate from commitments and compliance themselves. These effects can be driven by iterative and participatory institutional features, which are increasingly prevalent…
Multi-Label Prediction for Political Text-as-Data
Political scientists increasingly use supervised machine learning to code multiple relevant labels from a single set of texts. The current “best practice” of individually applying supervised machine learning to each label ignores information on inter-label association(s), and is likely to under-perform as a result. We introduce multi-label prediction as a solution to this problem. After reviewing the multi-label prediction framework, we apply it …
The diversity of repression
Tactical repertoires of mobilization and repression play an essential role in understanding dynamics of political violence, yet existing quantitative approaches focus primarily on intensities or counts of repressive actions. We focus instead on the diversity of repression, and demonstrate a novel method of measuring repertoires of state repression using event data. We show that more repressive states are likely to employ more diverse repertoires …
Accountability in Time
How do participatory institutions change over time? Previous research has focused on exogenous changes, such as legal reform or leadership replacement. But institutions also evolve endogenously, through processes of behavioral and compositional change on the part of citizen claimants and government officials. These processes can gradually reshape institutions to become more responsive to either expert or nonexpert claimants. The authors refer to …
From norms to programs
Norms shape policy when they get translated into concrete programs. What if a widely shared norm gets translated into a weak program? How might this influence the program's legitimacy? We examine these issues in the context of the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary program that embodies the widely shared norm of corporate responsibility. While both international intergovernmental organization (IGO) and international non‐governmental organ…
Signaling Environmental Stewardship in the Shadow of Weak Governance
This article examines how the quality of domestic regulatory institutions shapes the role of global economic networks in the cross-national diffusion of private or voluntary programs embodying environmental norms and practices. We focus on ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world, which encourages participating firms to adopt environmental stewardship policies…
The Political Origins of Transparency
Transparency has been hailed as the key to better governance, yet political actors have many reasons to resist transparency. This article studies one prominent transparency policy, Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, which have been passed by over 80 countries. By institutionalizing transparency, FOI laws increase the costs for political actors to use public office—and public information—for private gain. Why have so many states passed FOI laws de…
Public Authority and Private Rules
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 th…
Governing Global Supply Chains
Research over the past decade has made considerable progress toward achieving a holistic understanding of the myriad actors, interests, and relationships shaping labor rights in global supply chains, but numerous obstacles remain to building a more cumulative research program. In this essay we outline two major challenges and several fruitful directions forward. First, we review the different outcomes of interest in research on labor rights and h…
Building Capacity, Building Rights? State Capacity and Labor Rights in Developing Countries
Bluewashing” the Firm? Voluntary Regulations, Program Design, and Member Compliance with the United Nations Global Compact
Voluntary programs have emerged as important instruments of public policy.We explore whether programs lacking monitoring and enforcement mechanisms can curb participants' shirking with program obligations.Incentive-based approaches to policy see monitoring and enforcement as essential to curb shirking, while norm-based approaches view social mechanisms such as norms and learning as sufficient to serve this purpose.The United Nations Global Compac…
Competing for Transparency
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 tak…
Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act
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 politi…
What information do citizens want? Evidence from one million information requests in Mexico
The Politics of Scrutiny in Human Rights Monitoring
Human rights monitoring reports play important roles both in the international human rights regime and in productions of human rights data. However, human rights reports are produced by organizations subject to formal and informal pressures that may influence the topics considered salient for attention and scrutiny. We study this potential using structural topic models (STMs), a method used for identifying the latent topical dimensions of texts a…
When does open government shut? Predicting government responses to citizen information requests
Methods for the analysis of “big data” on citizen‐government interactions are necessary for theoretical assessments of bureaucratic responsiveness. Such big data methods also stand to benefit practitioners' abilities to monitor and improve these emerging transparency mechanisms. We consider supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) as a potential method for these purposes. To this end, we use sLDA to examine the Mexican government's (non)resp…
Learning from Our Mistakes
In public administration today, many new reform ideas mingle, offering new diagnoses of governmental problems and courses of action. But scholars have highlighted reasons why we should doubt the optimistic claims of reformists. A new set of policy tools called “open government” arrived nearly a decade ago, and scholars have not yet explained its origins or prospects as specific approach to management reform. In this article, we address this lacun…
Measuring Human Rights Abuse from Access to Information Requests
Existing measures of human rights abuses are often only available at the country-year level. Several more fine-grained measures exhibit spatio-temporal inaccuracies or reporting biases due to the primary sources upon which they rely. To address these challenges, and to increase the diversity of available human rights measures more generally, this study provides the first quantitative effort to measure human rights abuses from textual records of c…
The Political Logic of Government Disclosure
When citizens ask questions, how does their government answer? Requests for government information confront officials with incentives both for and against disclosure. We argue that officials seek to manage political risks in ways that favor requests from government-aligned regions. We study responsiveness in the context of Mexico's access-to-information law, using publicly available data from several hundred thousand information requests filed wi…
Media Attention and Bureaucratic Responsiveness
How does media attention shape bureaucratic behavior? We answer this question using novel data from the Mexican federal government. We first develop a new indicator for periods of anomalously heightened media attention, based on 150,000 news articles pertaining to 22 Mexican government ministries and agencies, and qualitatively categorize their themes. We then evaluate government responsiveness using administrative data on roughly 500,000 request…
The diversity of repression
Tactical repertoires of mobilization and repression play an essential role in understanding dynamics of political violence, yet existing quantitative approaches focus primarily on intensities or counts of repressive actions. We focus instead on the diversity of repression, and demonstrate a novel method of measuring repertoires of state repression using event data. We show that more repressive states are likely to employ more diverse repertoires …
Audits for Accountability
Theories of retrospective accountability assume that voters punish poor governance and reward improvements, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We extend this research to a new context, assessing the impact of audits on electoral outcomes in South African municipalities. Our novel identification strategy focuses on by-elections triggered by deaths in office of local councilors and compares those taking place before and after audit results are a…
Process effects of multistakeholder institutions
How does membership in transnational multistakeholder institutions shape states' domestic governance? We complement traditional compliance‐based approaches by developing a process model, focusing on the independent effects of processes associated with institutional membership, but separate from commitments and compliance themselves. These effects can be driven by iterative and participatory institutional features, which are increasingly prevalent…
Multi-Label Prediction for Political Text-as-Data
Political scientists increasingly use supervised machine learning to code multiple relevant labels from a single set of texts. The current “best practice” of individually applying supervised machine learning to each label ignores information on inter-label association(s), and is likely to under-perform as a result. We introduce multi-label prediction as a solution to this problem. After reviewing the multi-label prediction framework, we apply it …
Partisan Context and Procedural Values
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 w…
Do voters differentially punish transnational corruption
A large literature studies whether, and under what circumstances, voters will electorally punish corrupt politicians. Yet this literature has to date neglected the empirical prevalence of transnational dimensions to real‐world corruption allegations, even as corruption studies undergo a ‘transnational turn’. We use a survey experiment in the United Kingdom in 2020 to investigate whether voters differentially punish politicians associated with tra…
Accountability in Time
How do participatory institutions change over time? Previous research has focused on exogenous changes, such as legal reform or leadership replacement. But institutions also evolve endogenously, through processes of behavioral and compositional change on the part of citizen claimants and government officials. These processes can gradually reshape institutions to become more responsive to either expert or nonexpert claimants. The authors refer to …
Information Processing in Participatory Institutions
Participatory institutions often aim to yield information useful to policymakers, whether about public preferences, problems, or solutions. But how can large numbers of public contributions be processed into interpretable and actionable information outputs? As theorists and practitioners increasingly call for participatory institutions to operate at larger scales, often enabled by new technologies, this challenge only becomes more important. This…
Political science (22 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Business (14 works) · Economics (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Public Administration (11 works) · Government (linguistics (10 works) · Public Administration (10 works) · Public relations (9 works)