What Affects the Information Provided on the Web? Case of Czech Rural Municipalities

Abstract

Electronic information availability has become an innate part of public corporate governance on all levels of public administration. Given paper focuses on such availability made throughout a platform of municipal website. Firstly, the paper objective focuses on identification of current level of web information openness. Secondly, it aims on examination of factors affecting the level of openness. Primary data on the information openness were gathered through the website analysis of randomly selected municipalities (n = 400) with population up to 2,000 inhabitants. The findings showed that majority of municipalities operate functional website (97%). Worse situation was found in provision of information about local politicians (particularly their contact details) and the office (official mail, e-mail and telephone). The openness in economic transparency is satisfactory regards to publishing of municipal documents and its extent; however not as good situation is in openness of public procurement description. Research hypothesis examination confirmed that information openness is positively associated with municipal population, wealth of the municipality and lack of municipal debt; on the other hand the information openness is not influenced by belonging of the municipality to certain region neither personality of the mayor.

Keywords

• Czech Republic
• public governance
• provision of information
• municipality
• openness
• website