Challenging Conceptual and Empirical Definition of e-Government toward Effective e-Governance

Abstract

The impact of ICT on public service delivery has been debated in the form of e-government, e-democracy e-participation and e-governance. The article examines the way e-government is defined operationally in the international statistics such as the e-Government benchmark (European Commission) and the e-government survey (United Nations) in order to understand the concept measured. E-government, as defined empirically, seems not to consider government responsiveness to bottom-up forms of e-participation. Thus, judgments based on these statistics may be biased. Indeed, the analysis and evaluation of a citizen-driven system for local public service improvement-DecoroUrbano.org-which uses the internet to voice public services concerns or reporting issues, suggests that the unbalance highlighted in international statistics between a high level of supply (from governments) and a low level of demand (from citizens) may be inverted when considering these forms of distributed democracy.