Electronic Administration and Transparency as an Object of Research in Librarianship and Information Science Studies in Spain: A Study of Spanish Municipalities of 3001 to 5000 Inhabitants

Introduction

Public Administrations as bodies that manage public and collective interests have had to adapt to important changes over recent decades in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the services they provide to citizens and enterprises. These organisms are configured as a complex of relationships in which are found two different but complementary spheres for the development of their functions: a political sphere accessed (in democratic countries) by a body of people elected by the citizens, and a purely administrative sphere of personnel who execute the policies which the political sphere defines and the everyday tasks marked by the different legal norms that come under its scope.

Administrations have for a long time been closed entities, governed by a dense bureaucratic organization which defined vertical relationships with those administered, while projecting a shadow of opacity in both their operation and their decision-making processes. Nonetheless, the foundations of a new concept of Administration began to be laid in the 1950s and 1960s, and has taken shape over the years since then. There emerged an international trend aimed at adapting public management to more dynamic models. Other facts would be added to these in the following decades. In the 1970s, there was a global economic crisis caused by a rise in oil prices which affected public spending, and created the need to seek formulas aimed at finding greater efficiency in management with less money. In the 1980s, the spread of the microcomputer industry together with software aimed at carrying out various tasks when applied to the area of Public Administration allowed it to automate many processes. And in the 1990s, the evolution of the Internet and its take-up by the general public allowed Administrations to find new channels of diffusion. This meant that a previously opaque culture began to transform into a more transparent one in which the work of the personnel of these organizations was made visible. At the same time, it allowed the bases to be established for political managers to be held accountable and the decision-making process to become more transparent.

The factors described above laid the foundations of the so-called e-Administration. Although its operation is marked by including both back-office and front-office processes, it implied a profound transformation in the functioning and culture of Public Administrations. Also, as a new area, e-Administration involves an abundant set of organizational, management, and technological issues (Lee, 2010), the application of which needs to be studied, measured, and analysed.

There have been many conceptual approaches to e-Administration, and, as López-López et al. (2018) note, there is no widely accepted consensus. Originally, different authors addressed the vagueness of the concept (Aldrich, Bertot, & McClure, 2002; Hwang, Choi, & Myeong, 1999). Yildiz (2007) pointed out that most of the research done so far had been limited to describing the results and products of e-Administration, without analysing the political nature of its development processes or any in-depth recognition of the political and institutional environments involved.

In the early years of the emergence of the technology, technological issues in government were more of peripheral concern than a central management function. Thus information technology (IT) was used to automate internal operations and improve the efficiency of administrative activities (Zuboff, 1988). Nonetheless, with the generalisation of the Internet, its potential usefulness was soon realised. Yildiz (2007) lists the uses of technology to improve the services for citizens: the creation of networking structures and interconnections between administrations, the explosion of services, the improvement of efficiency and efficacy, interactivity, decentralisation, and transparency or accountability. Thus, since the beginning of the 21st century, electronic government, or e-Administration, has expanded as a slogan in public administrations to cover all these functions. In a basic and straightforward way, the OECD (2003) describes the new model as: “the use of ICTs, and particularly the Internet, as a tool to achieve better government.”