Refine
Document Type
- Article (17) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- no (17)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (17)
Keywords
- Evaluation (1)
- Informationsfreiheit (1)
- Open Data (1)
Freedom of information (FOI) laws aim to improve the public’s opportunities to access official information from public authorities and hence to increase the level of transparency. Thus, it is important to know whether and to what degree the effects intended by establishing FOI laws are achieved and how their implementation could be improved. In order to answer these questions, FOI laws have to be evaluated. Unfortunately, attempts to evaluate FOI laws are still in their infancy. To promote sound evaluation, this article aims to provide guidance on how comprehensive FOI law evaluations might be designed and conducted.
Governments and energy operators are frequently confronted with opposition to the construction of new highvoltage transmission lines. In this context, a recent experiment by Mueller et al. (2017) tested the so-called proximity hypothesis and found that spatial proximity to proposed transmission line corridor route alternatives significantly affected residents' likelihood of having negative risk expectations, showing low levels of support, and engaging in protest against the planned facility. Moreover, their findings suggest that the relationship between spatial proximity and the dependent variables is appropriately modeled by a distance decay function, showing that effects attenuate with increasing distance from the infrastructure site. Unfortunately, because of the fact that the study is the only one that has tested the proximity hypothesis in the context of planning new trans-mission lines so far, the existing evidence cannot be considered as a solid knowledge base. Therefore, to strengthen the reliability of the existing evidence, the natural experiment of Mueller et al. (2017) has to be replicated, which is the purpose of the present study. The findings of the replication clearly support the results provided by Mueller and colleagues and provide further empirical evidence that strengthens the proximity hypothesis in the context of power grid expansion.
The characteristics of creative educational interventions and the way they are implemented in the field often make their evaluation a challenging task. This article uses an exemplary intervention from a large-scale consumer education program on climate protection to present the design, method, and results of a two-step evaluation procedure which allows evaluators to cope with such a situation. Step 1 aims to answer the question of whether or not an intervention actually has the intended effects. Step 2 then assesses the factors that contribute to those effects. Thus, such a two-step evaluation yields information, not only on which interventions are effective and should therefore be maintained, but also on how they should be designed to achieve maximum effects.