Categorie: Onderzoek

In the Netherlands, electronic service delivery has become an important issue in many municipalities. Using the Internet for service delivery is seen as an important element of e-government. Based on 2014–2016 panel data for all Dutch municipalities, we show that there is a large variety among the municipalities in the extent to which they offer their service delivery digitally. By exploring the factors that may explain the differences among the municipalities, some trends can be discerned. Most notably is the strong relationship of e-government adoption with demographic characteristics, such as population, population density and both older age and younger age groups. Remarkably, we did not find an influence of education and income. Finally, we did not observe a relation between municipal allocated costs and level of e-maturity, hereby leaving the question open if and how e-government can lead to cost reductions.

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Vandaag verscheen het artikel ‘Meer inzicht in publiek geld is basis voor vertrouwen’ op Platform Overheid. Je kunt het artikel hier raadplegen.

Vandaag verscheen de eerste rapportage over Innovatie in Publieke Verantwoording. Lees hier het nieuwsbericht.

The field of public sector reporting is moving from vertical to horizontal accountability: from hierarchical relationships that mediate between public organisations and citizens to directly disclosing available information. IT developments play an important role in innovative forms of reporting that respond to the growing importance of horizontal accountability.

This paper provides an overview of some of the most important initiatives on the plane of reporting innovations, such as gov.uk and OpenSpending, as well as recent examples in the Netherlands. The examples underline the importance of horizontal accountability forms, as well as the significance of ‘horizontal integration’: the idea that systems are fully integrated across different functions. However, issues of interoperability, security, and information architecture persist, often pared with the lack of authority to coerce (cross-sectoral) reporting changes. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these initiatives can aid further improvement in public accountability. We argue that the new forms of reporting do not only influence the question how reporting is composed, but that they also affect what is reported and for whom the reporting is compiled.

De Open Budget Index is een benchmark die centrale overheden van meer dan honderd landen analyseert en rangschikt. Nederland neemt echter geen deel hieraan. Onlangs legde ik met collega’s de rijksoverheid langs deze internationale meetlat. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat de Nederlandse rijksoverheid met haar begrotings- en verantwoordingscyclus in deze index op plaats 13 staat, en daarmee tot de internationale subtop behoort.

In dit artikel dat vandaag in is verschenen wordt besproken op welke vlakken Nederland hoog scoort, maar ook waar verbetering mogelijk is.