Transparency and Responsibility in the Public Administration Institutions. The Case of Romania

• Author: Catalin I. Vrabie, Andreea-Maria Tîrziu
• Pages: 165-170

The European Citizen and Public Administration

165

The European Citizen and Public Administration

Transparency and Responsibility in the

Public Administration Institutions. The case of Romania

Cătălin I. Vrabie1, Andreea-Maria Tîrziu2

Abstract: An important topic often found in the media, but ambiguously treated is “transparency”. This article

will present a blueprint for Romanian municipalities’ Websites done through the transparency concept’s filter.

We will see that although the law imposes to municipalities to post specific items on the Internet, they either

omit or post a minimum of infor mation just to “follow” the rules, without giving any evidence of interest.

Assuming that displaying online more information requested by the law will lead to an increased users’

confidence in the system, we accessed the Website of each municipality in Romania (103) to search for the

existence of financial data (budgets, financial ind icators, assets etc.). In the end, we have presented a brief

report on how the government responds to citizens’ concerns. The results are not very satisfactory, but we

consider that such analyses will create a competition between municipalities, in which citizens are the winners.

Keywords: government; municipality; electronic; transparency; responsibility

1. Introduction

This analysis aims to present a radiograph of the official Websites’ status for all the municipalities in

Romania and on how they respond to transparency needs (Baltac, 2011). It is understood that the

existence of very well designed Web platform (from a technical point of view) does not imply that

they’re also used by citizens or the business part of the society (Porumbescu, 2015) – the reason for this

is that the Web platform does not provide the information they need (MCISa).

Taking into consideration the legislation regarding the concept of Transparency3 (Chamber of

Deputiesa), we took a closer look on each of the Romanian municipality’s official Website in order to

present, in figures, how close they are to this by putting this concept into motion.

2. Background

An aspect of interest in assessing not only the current state of the e-Government in Romania, but also

possible future developments in this regard is represented by Romanian citizens’ level of satisfaction

and their requirements for the public administration. From this perspective, our country holds a position

1PhD Lecturer, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania, Address: Expoziției 2

Blvd., Bucharest 012103, Romania, Tel.: +40723689314, Corresponding author: catalin.vrabie@snspa.ro.

2PhD Candidate, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania, Address: Expoziției

2 Blvd., Bucharest 012103, Romania, E-mail: tirziu.andreea@yahoo.com.

3 Law no. 52 of 21 January 2003 on decisional tran sparency in the public administration, published in the Official Monitor of

Romania no. 70 of 3 February 2003.