Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 14th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview VI. Working Group on E-government Author(s) Tanju Tosun Ege University Izmir Turkey Gulgun Erdogan Tosun Title Bridging the gap between local governments and citizens: Do web sites matter for creating governance? Some observations on Turkish local governments File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Traditional information and communication technologies (ICTs) were not so successful to bridge the gap between government and citizens even if we were in a “video democracy” era. But new ICTs begin to serve for bridging the gap between governments and citizens. That is primarily the Internet. Even if we are at an early stage of adopting and shaping ICTs for social and political use, new guiding visions are coming forth as “e-democracy” and “e-government”. All these visions are somewhat a product of the internet. There is a strong link between the quality of democracy and information. The quality of the democratic process is determined by the information infrastructures that takes place in. The successful functioning of any democratic government is dependent upon efficient, multi directional flows of information. There are four categories of direction of information and communication flow; downward, upward, lateral (inward or outward), and interactive. Both citizens and governments need information for many reasons. Citizens need information about their central or local representatives so that they can be evaluated on the basis of their record and so that representative institutions can be transparent in their activities. Representatives within elected assemblies or parliaments need information about the executives’ policies so that they can pass effective legislation, scrutinize executive functions and hold governments to account if necessary. They also need information from individual citizens and groups about those issues of local or national importance that they are expected to follow up. They do so in order to represent the public and thereby to have a strong prospect of being re-elected. In the first phase of our presentation, a theoretical framework will be drawn. In other words, we will first of all stress a theoretical framework of the subject regarding the role of internet as a new ICT on governance. In Turkish administrative system both in central and local fields internet is began to be used very frequently. An e-government strategy was accepted in the 1990’s by the Turkish government. In the second part of this presentation, metropolitan municipality web sites will be examined and discussed as regards to the direction of information and communication flow to find out whether they serve governance or not in Turkey. We will discuss the stages of development of internet used in local governments. Then, we will examine those web sites of the related municipalities through some indicators and information-communication flow. We will basically try to answer such questions as these: Do metropolitan municipalities’ web sites function so as to provide for a flow of information from citizens to (downward information flow) the authorities? Do these sites give a chance to citizens to participate in local governments or serve only to give basic information to the public (upward information flow)? And also, whether these sites allow interactive information flow, and if so how? As a result, by evaluating web sites, we want to see the level of e-governance practices in Turkish municipalities especially in the 16 metropolitan municipalities.
