Is Romania Ready for Nation-Wide Public e-Services?: Five Factors to Consider before Adopting an E-Government Public Policy

Theoretical Background

If it is to define politics either as a battle between ideologies or a struggle for life improvement then, in the case of public policies, the last approach seems the suitable one. From such a perspective, the politics dimension that mostly interest people is the practical one, the concrete action that finally reflects the impact of governance upon society and its capacity of making things better or worse. As Carl J. Friedrich (1963) noted long time ago, a public policy represents a government’s intentional course of action in a specific environment containing obstacles and opportunities that the government aims to use or surpass in its effort to reach or achieve a specific set of objectives. Largely defined, a public policy consists in a multitude of governmental planned processes involving various actors, social context and values, a specific discourse, and different types of institutions, networks and organizations (Considine, 2005).

Although most of governments’ actions can be considered incremental in the sense that they are only marginally modifying existing programs or practices, the e-government policies do not automatically fall within a model of incremental transformation. While sometimes the public policies on e-government are following an incremental pattern, they also seem to differentiate themselves as the new arrivals in an old territory do and impose radical changes. Hence, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that e-government is based on could require even a “re-ordering of the state’s administrative structures and of government itself” (Lanzara, 2009) and, depending on specific socio-political realities, a country may be able of huge e-government progresses in a very short period of time (Misuraca et al., 2010).

What makes some particular countries to be able of such astonishing e-government achievements? We will start answering this question by looking at two of the models proposed in the literature on the classic public administration: the model of the internal determinants and that of diffusion (external determinants). The internal determinants model asserts that the factors leading towards innovation are internal technical, political, economic or social characteristics of a state and its society, while the diffusion model describes the adoption of a new policy as a side effect of similar policies already promoted/implemented by other states (Berry and Berry, 1999).