Territorial patterns of open e-government: evidence from Chilean municipalities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the development of open e-government between 2019 and 2021 in Chile’s 345 municipalities. We aggregated an e-government index (EGi) to measure the provision of local digital services for citizens. We then combined this with indicators of transparency and access to public information to create an open e-government index (OEGi). Our empirical strategy is based on geospatial econometric analysis in two stages: first, we describe and georeference our index, estimating the level of spatial autocorrelation and then fit different econometric models to measure the impact of the degree of Internet use, socioeconomic dynamism and management capacity on the municipalities’ development of open e-government. Our main findings indicate that monetary poverty has a negative effect on the index, while the municipal government’s budget has a positive effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Local governments
• e-government
• open government
• transparency
• management capacity

Acknowledgements

This work is dedicated to the memory of Eduardo Araya. We appreciate the feedback from participants at the ALACIP Spatial Symposium held virtually in July 2022, at the Smart Cities and Open Government Seminar in Madrid in September 2022, and at Digital Democracy Workshop 2022 in Zurich in October 2022. We also thank the support for revising municipalities’ websites to aggregate our index provided by Rodrigo Cuevas, Berenice Orvenes and Elinor Luco.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data can be obtained on Zenodo: González-Bustamante, B., and D. Aguilar. 2023. “Data Set on Local Government Indicators in Chile (Version 0.21.15 – Late Sky)” (dataset, pre-release version). University of Oxford, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) and Training Data Lab. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7568387.

Notes

1 Directly elected representatives who participate in the Municipal Council, a body of a normative, deliberative and supervisory nature, chaired by the municipal district’s mayor, that is responsible for materialising the effective participation of the local community. Each Municipal Council has between six and ten members, depending on the size of the municipal district. Algarrobo, for example, has a six-member Municipal Council.

2 The first cluster includes Spain, Brazil, Portugal and Mexico and has the most publications, citations, and H-indexes. Together, these countries make up 85.9% of the documents published, and 92.9% of the citations received. The second cluster comprises Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Uruguay and has fewer publications and citations than the first cluster. These countries constitute 14.5% of the documents and 7.4% of the citations. Then, the third cluster includes Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and has even fewer publications and citations than the second cluster. The third cluster sums up 3.4% of the documents and 0.8% of the citations. Finally, the fourth cluster includes Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras, Paraguay, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama and has the fewest publications and citations of all the clusters.

3 In the case of the population’s characteristics and their effect on the development of e-government at the local level, the variables highlighted by the literature include age. For instance, van Dijk, Peters, and Ebbers (2008) found that, among the Dutch population, younger people are the most open to the use of technology. Budding, Faber, and Gradus (2018) reached a similar conclusion after analysing the maturity of the e-government sites of approximately 400 Dutch municipalities, finding that demographic, rather than socioeconomic, characteristics explain their level of e-government.

4 It is important to note that different studies have suggested that a population’s per capita income explains its use of the Internet (Lowatcharin and Menifield 2015) and demand for access to public information (Dias and Costa 2013), both at the local and national levels. Income is associated with the local socioeconomic dynamism construct in the framework of the local socioeconomic determinants category in Dias’ (2020) empirical model.

5 The internal determinants of local e-government, especially the size of municipalities, tend to be highly correlated with the determinants of innovation (Dias 2020). In this context, the diffusion of innovation theory from the 1960s explains adoption as a process in which innovativeness is passed or communicated through specific channels over time in a systemic context (Rogers 2003; see also Dias 2020).

6 Although the e-democracy phase is considered in Esteves’ (2005) model and updated versions, it is relevant to note this could be associated with potential conceptualisation and measurement limitations. This concept, on the one hand, could be related to the e-participation dimension in the empirical model of Dias (2020), which is not part of the e-services dimension. On the other hand, some concerns about measurements could arise. For example, the phenomenon’s complexity may not be reflected in the binary codification in this model, which has measured online forums and referendums, mainly e-voting processes on local issues.

7 We downloaded 1,406,466 observations on 9 July 2022 in comma-separated format. We then restricted the date of filing of the requests to the study period, obtaining 690,746 observations. Finally, we discarded all requests that were not addressed to a municipal government, reducing the set to 233,196 observations, equivalent to 33.8% of the requests filed during the period.

8 We carried out imputations for 12 missing cases in 2019 (3.5% of the municipalities) and eight in 2021 (2.3%), as well as 17 cases of municipal governments that did not receive transparency requests in 2019 (4.9% of the municipalities) and 15 in 2020 and 2021 (4.4%) (see Supplementary Material file for details of this procedure). We then assembled an average estimate of the EGi for 2020 and, finally, aggregated all these variables into OEGi.

9 The indicator used corresponds to monetary poverty in 2020 with a small area estimation (SAE) for Chile’s 345 municipal districts. In 256 districts, it corresponds to a Fay-Herriot estimator that combines direct estimates from the National Socioeconomic Characterisation Survey of Chile (CASEN) with a synthetic estimate calculated using econometric models with the administrative variables of wages, occupation, health and education. For the other municipal districts, only the synthetic estimate was used. For more details, see DOS-MDSF and ECLAC (2021).

10 For all the indicators, in general, we used the most recent information available except in the case of Internet connections by municipal district, where updated information was not available for all municipal districts and we used 2018 information for 22 districts (6.4% of the total number).

11 Through this fund, the country’s municipal governments redistribute their own revenues in a solidary manner. The FCM’s mission is to reduce inequalities between municipalities and provide additional resources for those with the lowest tax revenues. It consists primarily of contributions from those municipal governments that collect the most resources in the form of business licences, vehicle taxes, real estate taxes and fines.

12 Under the Constitutional Organic Law on Municipalities, each municipal government must establish a protocol on forms of local citizen participation, indicating the type of organisations that must be consulted and informed, as well as the dates or times at which these processes must take place.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) under the Grant USA2156 POC2022_FAE2; the International Political Science Association (IPSA) under the IPSA RC05-RC10-RC22-GIGAPP-AECPA Travel Grant; and the Universität Zürich under the Digital Democracy Workshop 2022 Travel Grant.