1. Introduction
Public information on data and elements of interest are on the rise in contemporary society (Kassing, Johnson, Kloeber, & Wentzel, 2010) that has identified increased public awareness as a method of achieving its objectives of sustainability (Kendall, 2008) and transparency (Welch, 2012).
The need of authorities to inform the public comes derives also from the mandatory character of certain information, as foreseen in the provision of several European Directives (Directive 2003/35/CE, Directive 85/337/CE or Directive 96/61/CE). Romania, as a member country of the European Union should enforce the provision of European directives in the national legislation (such as Law no. 544/2001 regarding the free access to information of public interest).
The main purpose of the websites of authorities is to inform and educate the public by ensuring transparency and promoting projects (Karkin & Janssen, 2014) and reducing time consumption, as 80% of the citizens believe that the public services offered on the Internet allow them to save time (Sa, Rocha, & Cota, 2015). Built in an interactive manner, their websites should also have the capacity of collecting information and monitor public opinion (Uzuno”lu & Misci Kip, 2014), increasing the citizen’s trust in the authorities (Hong, 2013).
Development of web resources and increased internet access facilitated the flow of information in both public and private institutions. This technological development had a significant impact in the information about data with public character (Chen, Wang, Liu, Wu, & Wang, 2013), national and local authorities developing institutional websites that evolved in the main methods of communication between citizens and public institutions (Karkin & Janssen, 2014), fostering the emergence of the e-government concept (Huang & Benyoucef, 2014).
E-government comes with many definitions (Verdegem & Verleye, 2009), all of them underlying the relation between information technology (Basu, 2004) and increased access and delivery of information or services to the public (Huang & Benyoucef, 2014) with the purpose of increasing the citizen’s confidences in the authorities (Morgeson, VanAmburg, & Mithas, 2010) and the communication between actors (Sousa, Agante, & Gouveia, 2014). Although e-government has both information and transaction components, the current e-government applications remain mainly as a one-way communication (Hong, 2013).
In developed countries authorities have developed their websites and even associated social networks account to them for better reaching the citizens and increasing the transfer of information (Marlin-Bennett & Thornton, 2012) based on changes in the internet through social, economic and technologic tendencies that promote a large involvement of users and greater opening towards the access to information (Georgescu & Popescu, 2014) or promote multimedia tools such as video, audio, or online presentations (Sandoval-Almazan & Gil-Garcia, 2012), although disparities between developed and developing countries in their e-government are still observed by surveys (United Nations, 2014).
Governments worldwide face a permanent challenge of transformation and reinvention, in order to deliver services in an efficient, efficacious and cost effective way (Zhao, Shen, & Collier, 2015), therefore the need to monitor the success of their politics and programs. The E-Government Development Index (EGDI) is an aggregated indicator of three important dimensions of e-government: provision of online services, telecommunication connectivity and human capacity (United Nations, 2014), with a world average of 0.4721.
Previous studies on authorities’ websites have focused on the perspectives of users and websites (Wang, 2014), with an emphasis on the accessibility of websites (Youngblood, 2014) in wide range of approaches (Kuzma, 2010). Other studies have analysed the model of communication existing on the websites (Endres, 2009) or the use of websites in academic research, because they contain valuable information for teaching, research and the provision of consulting services (Chen et al., 2013). Only a few studies analysed the geographical distribution of information presented on the websites of authorities (Youngblood, 2014).
Public information is realised in Romania both through traditional methods (panels and notice boards at the headquarters of local authorities ‘ city halls, local councils, environmental protection agencies, etc.) and modern methods (the use of online resources ‘ websites, social media or mass media). The process is confronted with a series of obstacles in the enforcement of an efficient e-government for local authorities in Romania: lack of interest, reduced awareness of the citizens, impossibility of using state-of-the-art technologies, limits in the creativity of employees, deficiencies in using experts in the field (Georgescu & Popescu, 2014). These deficiencies are causes in the emergence of various conflicts (Tudor, Ioj”, P”tru-Stupariu, Nit”, & Hersperger, 2014) or reduced public support for projects or decisions (Martin, 2007).
The main aim of our study is to evaluate the differences existing in the public information presented by local administrative units in Romania. For achieving this we have established the objectives of (1) assessing the information presented on the websites of local administrative units; (2) mapping the distribution of indicators for identifying geographical patterns of distribution and (3) ranking the local administrative units and counties after the level of public information they present.
2. Methodology
In our analysis we evaluated the e-government of local authorities from 3175 local administrative units (fig. 1) – LAU2 (municipalities, cities, communes, corresponding to EU NUTS 5) included in all of Romania’s counties (LAU1, corresponding to NUTS 4).
We obtained the limits of LAU2 from the National Authority for Cadastre and Real Estate (www.ancpi.ro, accessed at October 10, 2014) and the list of LAU2 by counties from the public database of the National Institute for Statistics (www.insse.ro, accessed at October 10, 2014).