Assessing and explaining local e-government maturity in the Iberoamerican community

Abstract

This paper assesses local e-government maturity in the Iberoamerican community. Sixty Andorran, Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, Colombian, Costa Rican, Mexican, Portuguese, Spanish, and Uruguayan cities were considered in this study. A demographic criterion was adopted to define the municipalities observed within those countries and a three-dimensional model was used to evaluate each municipal website. Then, we conclude that local e-government still has a substantial room for improvement in the region and that population density is relevant to explain local e-government maturity, albeit only in its intrinsic Information and Participation dimensions.

Territorial Patterns of Open E-Government: Evidence from Chilean Municipalities

“…The literature identifies a series of factors as determinants of the success of local egovernment. They include elements related to the availability of technological infrastructure (Alcaide-Muñoz et al, 2014;Lowatcharin and Menifield, 2015); the characteristics or size of the population (Dias and Costa, 2013;Maciel et al, 2016;Tejedo-Romero et al, 2022); organisational factors or local management capacity (Andrews and Entwistle, 2015;Andrews et al, 2013;Manoharan, 2013b;Norris and Moon, 2005;Puron-Cid and Rodríguez-Bolívar, 2018); and political factors (Sicáková-Beblavá et al, 2016;Tejedo-Romero and Ferraz Esteves de Araujo, 2018).…”

“…Indeed, several studies suggest that the number of inhabitants may influence local e-government by creating scale economies that enable municipal governments to distribute the costs of technological projects more efficiently (Andrews and Entwistle, 2015;Andrews et al, 2013;Boyne, 1995;Moon, 2002;Pina et al, 2010). Population density, in turn, impacts the amount of information and forms of participation used by municipal governments to create trust in their local management (Maciel et al, 2016). As explained in the next section, these variables are used as controls in our models.…”

Global e-government development: besides the relative wealth of countries, do policies matter?

“…Many studies worldwide have addressed the determinants of e-government development, including at the local level (Moon, 2002;Dias and Costa, 2013;Wang and Feeney, 2016); agency level (Ziemba et al, 2016), state level (West, 2000) and country level (Weerakkody et al, 2011;Franke and Eckhardt, 2014). Although some international perspectives on the subject address local e-government development (Wohlers, 2009;Maciel et al, 2016;Ingrams et al, 2018), the vast majority consider the country level as the basis for analysis. Among the latter, common approaches include the use of EGDI for performing comparative analysis in regional contexts (Aniscenko et al, 2017;Torres-Porras and Duarte-Amaya, 2018;Brimkulov and Baryktabasov, 2017) or between specific countries (Kurdi et al, 2016;Ulman et al, 2016) and to identify global trends.…”