Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 20th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview e-Government Author(s) Catalin Vrabie National School of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest Romania M. Kemal Oktem, Hacettepe University, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Ankara - Turkey Title Local e-government: A comparative study of Romania and Turkey File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Catalin Vrabie Abstract This paper is designed as a comparative study between Turkey and Romania on certain aspects of local electronic government elements of several localities of those 2 countries. The major differences between Turkey and Romania are making this study very interesting. Turkey's largest city has a population over 13 million inhabitants with an income per capita of 6.000 EURO, while in Romania Bucharest (the Romanian capital), has only three million inhabitants and an income per capita of 5.400 EURO (not a big difference, I may say). When we talk about the penetration of electronic technology and the Internet the situation is pretty much the same: in Turkey 42% of the population has access to the Internet and in Romania 35%. Together with Professor Dr. M.Kemal Öktem, I resorted to an in-depth analysis of official web sites of town halls. For this, we used a predefined scale taken from similar studies, but adapted to extract relevant elements. For a more accurate study we compared cities were the difference (in terms of finance and inhabitants) is not too big (like in the case of Bucharest vs. Ankara) but I took as the counterpart of Bucharest, the city Bursa from Turkey (the number of inhabitants and the average income here is pretty close to the Romanian capital) - I used the same strategy at the other municipalities as well. To those data obtained from the Internet we will match the financial information collected from statistical yearbooks which concern the number of investments in IT infrastructure made by the local authorities, the money spent by the population for purchasing IT equipment’s, or strictly the average income per capita of cities chosen for the study. We will find out why Internet users in Turkey visit and interact more frequently with the Local Administration Web Site than those in Romania. The intention is to draw in this study (and hopefully the attendance at the NISPA conference comes to help) researcher from other European countries in order to create a larger picture with more elements to compare. And, at the end, to build the architecture (structure, design, etc.) of a Web site designed to provide good interaction to citizens.
