Territorial Patterns of Electronic and Open Government in Chilean Municipalities

This project analyses the development of electronic and open government in 345 Chilean municipalities between 2019 and 2021. The main question is: What factors determine the development of e- and open government in Chilean municipalities? To answer this question, we developed an index that combines elements of e-government with transparency indicators for all municipalities in Chile.

For this, we will use Esteves’ (2005) e-services model, which contains several items grouped into five dimensions to evaluate governmental sites (Fath-Allah et al., 2017). We measure the quality of municipal e-government in the 345 municipalities of Chile in order to obtain an aggregate e-government index (EGi) to which we incorporate indicators of transparency and access to public information to create an electronic and open government index (EOGi). This composite index allows us to assess the provision of digital services, the development of e-government and the response to transparency law requests at the municipal level.

Design

Our methodological strategy is based on a two-stage geospatial econometric analysis. First, we describe and georeference our index by estimating the level of spatial autocorrelation. Then, we fit different econometric models to measure the impact of technological infrastructure, socio-economic level and administrative capacity on the development of e-government and open government in municipalities.

Expected outcomes

This project presents a novel integrated dataset with geospatial information and indicators of local governments in Chile between 2010 and 2022. We applied an e-services model to Chile’s 345 municipalities in order to measure an e-government index. We then expanded the index by incorporating transparency indicators from the requests for Access to publication information filed to the Council for Transparency in Chile.

We integrated these measurements with geospatial information and local government indicators compiled using the following open data and public information:

• Geospatial shapefiles and data from the Infrastructure of Geospatial Data of Chile portal and the Undersecretariat for Regional Development (IDE-Chile and SUBDERE, 2018, 2020).
• Data for the number of fixed Internet connections at the municipal district level from the Undersecretariat for Telecommunications (SUBTEL, 2022).
• The rate of monetary poverty from the Social Observatory Division of the Ministry of Social Development and the Family and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (DOS-MDSF and ECLAC, 2021).
• Indicators of the municipal budget with monetary correction and the professionalisation of municipal personnel based on the proportion holding a professional qualification, in both cases, using data from SUBDERE’s National System of Municipal Information (SINIM, 2022).
• Estimated population of the municipal district by the National Institute of Statistics (INE, 2022).

Resources

• SocArXiv preprint.
• OSF-Project.
• GitHub repository.
• Zenodo repository.
• Blog post: Territorial patterns of open e-government. The road to digital democracy in Chilean municipalities.

How to cite this dataset?

• González-Bustamante, B., & Aguilar, D. (2023). Data Set on Local Government Indicators in Chile. Dataset, pre-release version 0.21.15 – Late Sky, University of Oxford, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) and Training Data Lab.

Last updated: 19 March 2023.