@PARLIAMENT
		Octavian Hera, Sebastian Ailioaie, Sorin Kertesz February 19, 2004

If you send an email to a Member of the Romanian Parliament (MP), you have less than 10% chances to get a reply, although only a quarter of the representatives have public email addresses to start with.

The transparency indicator for electronic communication between citizens and Members of the Parliament is only 0.29 (on a scale from 0 to 5), according to the "@Parliament" study.

The results are based on an complex analysis performed over the Internet, between October 1st - November 30th, 2003. Two rounds of emails were sent to MP’s, as part of the study, i! n order to analyse their email reponsiveness. The emails asked questions about hot topics of the moment: the referendum for the New Constitution and the conclusions of the European Commisssion Country Report for Romania.

The poll group was selected based on the email addresses published on the official websites of the two chambers of the Romanian Parliament (www.cdep.ro and www.senat.ro). The full list contained 123 public addresses of Members of the Parliament, out of a total of 485 active MP's.

For the 123 emails sent each time, we have received 10 replies (8.1%) regarding the New Constitution and 12 replies regarding the Country Report (9.7%).

A few days ago the Minister of ITC, Dan Nica, has shown that according to recent data from the European SIBIS project (Statistical Indicators Benchmarking the Information Society), Romania is in first place in Europe regarding citizen's willingness to interact online with the publ! ic institutions.

The full report is available at:
http://www.edemocratie.ro/editoriale/eng/replyreaction.pdf