The European Citizen and Public Administration

Abstract

An important topic often found in the media, but ambiguously treated is “transparency”. This article will present a blueprint for Romanian municipalities’ Websites done through the transparency concept’s filter. We will see that although the law imposes to municipalities to post specific items on the Internet, they either omit or post a minimum of information just to “follow” the rules, without giving any evidence of interest. Assuming that displaying online more information requested by the law will lead to an increased users’ confidence in the system, we accessed the Website of each municipality in Romania (103) to search for the existence of financial data (budgets, financial indicators, assets etc.). In the end, we have presented a brief report on how the government responds to citizens’ concerns. The results are not very satisfactory, but we consider that such analyses will create a competition between municipalities, in which citizens are the winners.