scholarly journals Public Administration Transparency in E-government at Local Level of Czech Government

Author(s):  
Eva Ardielli

Transparency is currently required as an essential element of public administration functioning. It supports quality, effectiveness and economy of administration both at the central and the local level of government. Transparency is currently also supported by modernization trends in public administration utilizing an implementation of information technologies and open access to information. The key role in the modernization efforts of public administration plays worldwide e-government. It is the effective tool to transform the public administration and public services towards greater transparency, information availability and participation in decision-making process. The submitted paper is focused on the analysis of transparency principle application on the local level of government in the Czech Republic. It is based on the evaluation of transparency in local decision-making, information availability and participation possibility. The availability of selected information was analyzed on selected local municipal websites in the Moravian-Silesian region in the year 2014. The target is the assessing of information disclosure on official municipal websites, especially offering and availability evaluation of selected information and the evaluation of the rate of information availability on monitored municipal websites.

Author(s):  
Mirjam Dibra ◽  
Dea Strica

The public participation (PP) is widely legitimised as a vital prerequisite to achieve sustainable development and as a basic principle of democracy. Under the conditions of the new territorial administrative-territorial division of local government units in the Republic of Albania, the Malesia e Madhe (MM) Municipality is a new one. The purpose of this study was the assessment of attitudes of the local community of areas under the administration of MM Municipality on PP in local planning and decision-making in order to influence future behaviours of the local community to take active part in local decision-making processes. The questionnaire was used as a research instrument for the local community of this Municipality. The research results showed that the local community of this area was generally aware of the need for their involvement in local decision-making, but they considered the municipality as the main responsibility for their involvement in this process. Keywords: Albania, local planning & decision-making, Malesia e Madhe Municipality, public participation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Grimes

The Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, in partnership with Victoria University of Wellington’s Health and Wellbeing distinctiveness theme steering group, hosted a symposium on ‘The Four Wellbeings for Local Government’ on 26 February 2019. The symposium heard brief presentations from eight invitees from local government, central government, the private sector and NGOs: Justin Lester, Lyn Patterson, Karen Thomas, Peter McKinlay, Wayne Mulligan, Meg Williams, Danielle Shanahan and Suzy Morrissey. Inspired by these addresses and by the ensuing discussion, this article considers what the reintroduction of the ‘four well-beings’ into the Local Government Act might mean for local decision making.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-113
Author(s):  
Rolv Lyngstad

This paper discusses two contemporary trends in local decision-making. Firstly, there seems to be more centralised decision-making today than before in important policy fields such as welfare policy. Secondly, informal governance processes outside formal government structures open up for a substantial influence from non-elected political actors. The paper asserts that there is a connection between the trends, and argues that the centralisation tendencies in welfare issues might affect and encourage governance processes in other local policy arenas. These policy fields are mainly within the so-called ‘developmental policies’ that often facilitate more networking and partnership activities in ‘grey areas’ between the public, private and civil sectors in collective problem solving. Accordingly, more attention should be given to policy fields where governance networks operate, and the implications for revitalising democratic political participation should be studied. The paper concludes that the well-established rationales for local self-government and local democracy need to be reconsidered by taking into account these new decision-making structures.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Sean Tomlinson ◽  
Andy South ◽  
Joshua Longbottom

Preventable diseases still cause huge mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Research in spatial epidemiology and earth observation is helping academics to understand and prioritise how mortality could be reduced and generates spatial data that are used at a global and national level, to inform disease control policy. These data could also inform operational decision making at a more local level, for example to help officials target efforts at a local/regional level. To be usable for local decision-making, data needs to be presented in a way that is relevant to and understandable by local decision makers. We demonstrate an approach and prototype web application to make spatial outputs from disease modelling more useful for local decision making. Key to our approach is: (1) we focus on a handful of important data layers to maintain simplicity; (2) data are summarised at scales relevant to decision making (administrative units); (3) the application has the ability to rank and compare administrative units; (4) open-source code that can be modified and re-used by others, to target specific user-needs. Our prototype application allows visualisation of a handful of key layers from the Malaria Atlas Project. Data can be summarised by administrative unit for any malaria endemic African country, ranked and compared; e.g. to answer questions such as, ‘does the district with the highest malaria prevalence also have the lowest coverage of insecticide treated nets?’. The application is developed in R and the code is open-source. It would be relatively easy for others to change the source code to incorporate different data layers, administrative boundaries or other data visualisations. We suggest such open-source web application development can facilitate the use of data for public health decision making in low resource settings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 18-27
Author(s):  
Mari-Isabella Stan ◽  
Mihaela Rus ◽  
Tanase Tasente

Transparency is generally defined by political scientists as the principle of allowing the public to obtain information about the operations and structures of a given entity (Etzioni, 2014). Transparency symbolizes a mechanism for promoting good governance and public confidence in a modern and democratic public administration (Jashari and Pepaj, 2018). The theory of open public administration gives the individual a greater role in the adoption of the executive regulations and greater transparency in the operations of the public administration (Bugaric, 2004). A fully transparent administration, either at central level or at local level, involves informing and participating citizens in the decision-making process, becoming an indispensable principle of the rule of law. On the other hand, democratic citizenship involves obtaining information about the problems that affect you and working with others to influence how society will solve those problems (Portelli and Solomon, 2001). The objectives of the study are: (1) Identification of the degree of knowledge of the concept of decision-making transparency in public administration; (2) Analysis of the perception regarding the degree of decision-making transparency and communication of the local and central public administrations in the context of the crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic; (3) Analysis of the degree of confidence the crisis management generated by the new Coronavirus by public institutions. The questionnaire, which included 10 items, was applied, on a sample consisting of 200 students and graduates of the Faculty of Law and Administrative Sciences - “Ovidius” University of Constanța (Romania, European Union). The period of application of the questionnaire was April 4-10, 2020. Of these, 80.77% are female, and 19.23% are male, with an average age of 27.5 years. Most of the respondents (56.41%) are undergraduate students, and the remaining 43.59% are study participants are graduates or masters of the same Faculty. At the same time, 71.79% of the study participants come from urban areas, and 28.21% from rural areas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Sean Tomlinson ◽  
Andy South ◽  
Joshua Longbottom

Preventable diseases still cause huge mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Research in spatial epidemiology and earth observation is helping academics to understand and prioritise how mortality could be reduced and generates spatial data that are used at a global and national level, to inform disease control policy. These data could also inform operational decision making at a more local level, for example to help officials target efforts at a local/regional level. To be usable for local decision-making, data needs to be presented in a way that is relevant to and understandable by local decision makers. We demonstrate an approach and prototype web application to make spatial outputs from disease modelling more useful for local decision making. Key to our approach is: (1) we focus on a handful of important data layers to maintain simplicity; (2) data are summarised at scales relevant to decision making (administrative units); (3) the application has the ability to rank and compare administrative units; (4) open-source code that can be modified and re-used by others, to target specific user-needs. Our prototype application allows visualisation of a handful of key layers from the Malaria Atlas Project. Data can be summarised by administrative unit for any malaria endemic African country, ranked and compared; e.g. to answer questions such as, ‘does the district with the highest malaria prevalence also have the lowest coverage of insecticide treated nets?’. The application is developed in R and the code is open-source. It would be relatively easy for others to change the source code to incorporate different data layers, administrative boundaries or other data visualisations. We suggest such open-source web application development can facilitate the use of data for public health decision making in low resource settings.


2021 ◽  
pp. 232949652110288
Author(s):  
Meaghan Stiman

In theory, participatory democracies are thought to empower citizens in local decision-making processes. However, in practice, community voice is rarely representative, and even in cases of equal representation, citizens are often disempowered through bureaucratic processes. Drawing on the case of a firearm discharge debate from a rural county’s municipal meetings in Virginia, I extend research about how power operates in participatory settings. Partisan political ideology fueled the debate amongst constituents in expected ways, wherein citizens engaged collectivist and individualist frames to sway the county municipal board ( Celinska 2007 ). However, it was a third frame that ultimately explains the ordinance’s repeal: the bureaucratic frame, an ideological orientation to participatory processes that defers decision-making to disembodied abstract rules and procedures. This frame derives its power from its depoliticization potential, allowing bureaucrats to evade contentious political debates. Whoever is best able to wield this frame not only depoliticizes the debate to gain rationalized legitimacy but can do so in such a way to favor a partisan agenda. This study advances gun research and participatory democracy research by analyzing how the bureaucratic frame, which veils partisanship, offers an alternative political possibility for elected officials, community leaders, and citizens to adjudicate partisan debates.


Health Policy ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anke Richter ◽  
Katherine A. Hicks ◽  
Stephanie R. Earnshaw ◽  
Amanda A. Honeycutt

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-285
Author(s):  
Claudia Petrescu ◽  
Flavis Mihalache

Public services represent an important dimension of quality of society, as they create the contextual conditions for people to further their quality of life. Romanian public administration reform has brought about a constant institutional transformation, which has influenced both the specific features and the quality of the services. This article aims to analyse trends regarding the perceived quality of public services in Romania, in European comparative perspective, using the data of the European Quality of Life Survey (2003–2016). The article aims to understand the low satisfaction with public services in Romania against the background of the public service reform measures taken by government in this period. The article describes the context of Romanian public administration and public service reform, the most important public policy measures adopted and the most important challenges. The lack of vision in the public service reform, the partial introduction of reform elements, the permanent and, sometimes, conflicting changes are issues that may have influenced the way in which the population perceives the quality of public services. The decentralisation process of public services and the insufficient allocation of public funds for delivering such services at local level might have an impact on their quality and quantity perceived by the population. Keywords: public services; public administration reform; citizens’ satisfaction; New Public Management; New Weberianism.


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