The countries that first adopted national disclosure laws – for convenience, let us focus on the fourteen that adopted laws up to 1990 – had much in common. They were among the richest countries in the world. Almost all were politically stable democracies with a long tradition of respecting citizen rights and the rule of law, a lively popular press, and healthy and independent nongovernmental organizations. Many had a political culture that included a skepticism about state authority – whether in the strong form (as in the United States), or in the moderate form peculiar to the older Commonwealth countries and the states of Northern Europe. (In 2000, one European Union official dismissed the call for tougher disclosure rules as a pathology of “protestant Puritanism.”) All of these considerations eased the adoption of a disclosure law and made it more likely that the law would work in practice.

Indeed, it was common to think that some mix of these considerations was probably necessary as a prerequisite for the adoption of a disclosure law. One scholar suggested two conditions that were essential for a law to be adopted. One was a “fundamental commitment” to the institutions of liberal democracy, manifested in a long history of democratic rule. Such states, it was thought, would be more responsive to the case for protecting citizens' rights against state authority and robust enough to tolerate the uncertainties that could be generated by a new disclosure law.