Open Access Resource
Open Book: Open-Source Budget Transparency for Municipalities
With a majority of municipalities publishing their budgets as PDFs, Open Book offers a free alternative that towns own and run themselves.
Research & Resources
Through our books, case studies, journal articles, papers, and surveys, the Ash Center is home to some of the world’s most advanced research and publications on issues related to democratic governance and self-governance.
To explore all research authored by Ash Center faculty, please visit the Harvard Kennedy School website. You can view the Ash Center’s open access policy here.
Newest
Book
What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Book
Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy
Policy Brief
From Food to Finance: What Makes Disclosure Policies Effective?
Nutritional labels told dieters to cut calories — so they skipped the fat warning that actually mattered. Archon Fung, Mary Graham, David Weil, and Elena Fagotto studied 15 disclosure laws and found the same pattern again and again: giving people facts doesn’t guarantee they’ll use them the way policymakers intended.
Paper
The Political Economy of Transparency : What Makes Disclosure Policies Effective?
Restaurant letter grades changed how Los Angeles ate almost overnight. So why did mandatory hospital error reporting go nowhere, even as the death toll climbed past 44,000 a year? Archon Fung, David Weil, Mary Graham, and Elena Fagotto dig into what separates a transparency policy that reshapes an industry from one that just sits on a shelf.
Book
Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance
Policy Brief
The Political Economy of Transparency: What Makes Disclosure Policies Sustainable?
Paper
The Political Economy of Transparency: What Makes Disclosure Policies Sustainable?
Enron’s collapse rewrote financial disclosure rules. SUV rollovers rewrote auto safety labels. But not every transparency law ages well — some quietly degrade into empty paperwork exercises. Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil trace what separates a disclosure system built to last from one built to fail.
Paper
Information as Risk Regulation: Lessons from Experience
Medical mistakes, tainted tap water, junk food, toxic factories — four of the government’s most ambitious disclosure programs tackled four completely different problems. Mary Graham found they broke down in strikingly similar ways, and the lessons could shape every transparency law that comes after them.
Article
Disclosure of Toxic Releases in the United States
A last-minute rider that even the EPA and environmental groups shrugged off turned into one of the most quietly powerful pollution laws in US history. Mary Graham and Catherine Miller revisit the Toxics Release Inventory’s famous 46 percent decline — and find the real story is a lot messier than the headline number suggests.