DO GREEK MUNICIPAL WEBSITES MEET CITIZENS’ PERCEPTIONS ON ISSUE IMPORTANCE?

The purpose of the present study is first to evaluate local e-government initiatives in Greece from a citizen perspective and then to test how well Greek municipalities perform on the most important e-government applications as perceived by citizens. Towards this end, a citizen survey was conducted using an instrument that contained 14 indices and assessed citizens’ perceived importance of e-government as well as e-democracy features incorporated in municipal portals. Results indicate that Greek citizens are not ready to move forward with the adoption of more participatory and deliberative tools of local governments’ websites. Moreover, Greek citizens want easy to complete online services while they place emphasis on the informational content of the local governments’ websites. In addition they desire simple ways to communicate with their local governments such as contact or email forms and suggestion boxes. Based on the citizen survey results, a quantitative website analysis was conducted to examine the level of sophistication of Greek municipal portals in regards to the most important e-government features. Results suggest that Greek local governments can be regarded as laggards in the provision of online services to citizens and businesses as well as the inclusion of information for tourists.