Are Spanish Local Governments Preparing for Digital Era Governance? A Stakeholders´ Perspective

Abstract

According to the principles of the Digital Era Governance (DEG) current, establishing a network of relationships with public sector stakeholders (i.e. public employees, public managers and users of public services) will aid in producing the necessary changes to overcome conflictive values, rules, behaviors and frameworks in public service provision. The management of this network is thus essential for the performance of public service provision processes, since the diversity of values, needs, attitudes and competence levels of said stakeholders will affect the outcome of e-government strategies. In this paper, we want to know which municipalities are perceived to have developed better e-government relationships with their stakeholders than others, by comparing the level of interaction. Also, we question if the level of success in the development of these relationships is reflected in common practices that may relate to good practices revealed by the literature. By means of fuzzy ordering techniques applied to a sample of Spanish municipalities, and the definition of an ideal provided by experts, our results show that those municipalities that take care about relations and interactions with their stakeholders are successful e-government-wise, while not-so-successful ones have to improve some practices to provide a better public service.