Removing Government Notices from Newspapers Reduces Citizen Participation in Decision-Making

In 1789, during the first session of the first U.S. Congress, lawmakers issued a requirement: every bill, order, resolution, or vote must be published in public newspapers. States followed suit with similar laws requiring notifications of government actions in the local papers—typically short announcements about public hearings or possible changes in areas such as construction, taxes, or education.

More than two centuries after the passage of that first statute, some policymakers say that such a rule is now unnecessary. After all, the argument goes, newspapers are a dying industry; paying them to run notices amounts to a subsidy. Municipalities could save money by simply posting the information on government websites.

But critics say that eliminating the newspaper publication requirement will lead to a less informed citizenry, allowing officials to bury information more easily. Their argument is that reading a government website is something “few people think of doing on a whim,” says Anya Nakhmurina, an associate professor of accounting at Yale SOM. People might visit such a site to look up specific information, but “an average person wouldn’t just browse.”

To test whether newspaper notices are associated with citizen engagement, Nakhmurina and her colleagues examined the fallout from a recent Florida law that weakened the newspaper publication requirement. They found that afterward, fewer people showed up at public meetings to discuss issues. Commercial construction permits, which residents often oppose, were approved more readily too.

Their new working paper suggests that running notices only on government websites is followed by “a decline in awareness,” she says. And stifling the flow of public notices could have profound repercussions. “Ultimately, this is what we need for a functioning democracy—for people to interact with information that is produced by the government.”

Public notices can be published by a variety of “issuers,” including cities, counties, school districts, universities, or special districts that oversee a particular function such as water or fire. In 2022, Florida passed a bill stipulating that, in counties that operated public notice websites, issuers could place their public notices on that government site instead of (or in addition to) running it in a newspaper. Last year, lawmakers put forth similar bills in 14 other states.

To find out whether issuers did pull back on newspaper publication in Florida, Nakhmurina and her co-authors, Kimberlyn Munevar of Texas A&M University and Delphine Samuels of INSEAD, analyzed more than 150,000 public notices in the state from October 2020 to December 2024. The researchers compared issuers in counties that operated a website to those in counties without a website. Issuers in the second group would still be required to publish their notices in newspapers.

Public notices in newspapers declined by 37% in the first group of counties relative to the second group. And the decreases were substantial in categories that were highly relevant to constituents. For instance, notices about public hearings and zoning fell by 44% and 27%, respectively. Residents often resist new commercial development in or near their neighborhood because they don’t want the resulting noise and disruption.

The researchers then tested an argument made by proponents of the new policy, that citizens would easily switch to reading notices on the county website instead. The idea was that “the channel of the distribution doesn’t really matter,” Nakhmurina says. As long as officials post the information somewhere online, “people will find it.”

But when the researchers analyzed traffic to county websites before and after the new law took effect, they saw no significant change. While it’s possible that a few people made the effort to find notices on those sites, on average, “it didn’t happen,” she says.

Next, the team measured residents’ engagement by studying transcripts of public hearings. At these meetings, people typically introduce themselves before making comments. So the researchers could estimate the number of speakers by counting the unique names in each transcript.

After the new law, “we see this pronounced decline,” Nakhmurina says. In counties with websites, the average number of speakers at each meeting fell by 14% to 18%, compared to those without websites.

Finally, the researchers looked at commercial construction permits. After the newspaper publication requirement was weakened, the number of permits granted in counties with websites increased by 28% to 35%. “If you don’t have those people coming to the meetings, then it’s much easier for the local government to process this permit, and they keep issuing more,” she says.

With newspapers in decline, the effectiveness of newspaper notices may be fading. But for now, the dissemination of information through local papers “is something county websites don’t seem to be replicating,” Nakhmurina says.

Laws for public notices could still be modernized, but policymakers “need to think about how to make them discoverable,” she says. When almost everyone read the newspaper, “you would randomly bump into this information. In this modern age, it’s very hard to replicate exactly that.” One option might be to require issuers to publish notices on social media platforms, though researchers would need to test whether that method would be as effective as the current one.

One unanswered question is why local issuers chose to stop publishing their notices in newspapers when the requirement was relaxed. Officials might have simply wanted to save money. But, Nakhmurina says, “the decline in notices seemed to be happening exactly where the participation would be the highest”—in categories such as public hearings and zoning. The changes may have been driven by budget constraints, or by a calculated effort to bypass public input on potentially controversial government actions. In either case, she adds, “the result is the same.”

“The Yale School of Management is the graduate business school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut.”

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