With
frequent Internet users at 20% of Romania's population, the web becomes an important communication
channel for public institutions. Among them, the Parliament,
as a representative institution of the citizens, must
be open to the innovations facilitating its connection
with the population.
Our study
aims to identify the issues that require further developments,
as well as the successful solutions and applications.
It focuses on the essential aspects for providing citizens
with easier access to information and for making the legislative
process and parliamentary procedures more transparent.
The main topics of the analysis are:
The analysis
finds that the websites of the two chambers focus mostly
on presenting information (providing most essential information),
while overlooking accessibility and bi-directional communication
with citizens.
In the absence of other interactive functions,
the main communication mean available to citizens is the
email. However, only some 27% of the 485 Romanian MPs
have email addresses - far below the minimum in EU member
states (46%).
32 of the 42 counties represented in the
Senate don't have any senator with an email address. Nevertheless,
even if some MPs have an email address, this doesn't guarantee
their dialogue with the citizen: only 9% of the inquiries
sent via email receive an answer from parliamentarians.
The comparison with European websites confirms
the conclusions of the survey - the Romanian websites
do well in providing information, but they drop to the
bottom half of the table when it comes to interactivity
and accessibility.
Conclusions
and recommendations
Thus, the Romanian Parliament presents a
wide range of information online, but in terms of interactivity,
the MPs grant little importance to the dialogue with their
constituents.
Based on the analysis, the report presents
several recommendations for the websites of the two chambers,
as follows:
