...open data can have three crucial benefits. First – it helps limit power disparities. Lobbyists’ main advantage is often less their selective control of funding than their selective control of information. Making politically-relevant data available can (with caveats: see below) make it easier and cheaper for interests that are under-represented to make better and more compelling arguments for their perspective. Second, open data, where it is high quality, can help limit the tendency of factions to make up their own information as well as their own interpretations of that information, hence improving democratic politics (diversity of opinion and understanding is not cognitively helpful when it is unmoored from reality).

IMHO, open data is one leg of the stool. People also need to be literate and curious about the data. All the data in the world does nothing for a willfully ignorant society. This is the cynical approach that the US GOP has mastered that makes it so rare that I vote for them. Their approach to data too often has been to nullify it by treating facts as opinion, and opinion as sacred. Although I am sympathetic to some of their politics, I can't stand their method.

BTW, I'm not saying the Dems take the high ground, here. IMO their culture makes them less able to employ this strategy as effectively as the GOP. In fact, IMO it's the US media that is most culpable. Rational discussion isn't what best sells ad space.