Abstract

Any strategy to improve local public administration gives paramount importance to the development of electronic administration (E-Local Government) to facilitate interaction with citizens promoting efficiency, local participation, and sustainable development. This explains the numerous contributions to evaluating websites of local authorities, but they do not focus on modeling the citizen satisfaction induced by their use. This is why three research questions are addressed by this paper: how can such satisfaction be modeled, which attributes be considered and described and how to assess the relative importance assigned by citizens to each attribute?

The level of satisfaction is found to depend on the easiness of use of each site and of the available functionalities to share information, to provide services, and to promote participation. A model based on the Multiattribute Theory and using the OptionCards method is developed to estimate the relative importance assigned by each citizen to each attribute and it is successfully applied to a focus group.

The answers presented by the authors to these questions are applied to a sample of Portuguese websites allowing their benchmarking and the identification of a road map for im-provement. This instrument is applied to a set of Portuguese municipalities revealing a high level of disparity and confirming how important can be its application to assess inter-municipalities benchmarking, to diagnose their LGS major shortcomings and to support the design of a road map for improvement.

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