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E-governance and Citizen Information 40 Theoretical Framework. The Network Administration2.4.3. Change and New Conceptualisation of CitizensDuring the 1980s, there was a common belief that solving the problems of efficiency, secretism,slowness, etc. would improve the global operation of the public sector and, in turn, improvecitizens' relationship with and bad perception of the Public Administration. To tacklethese problems we can highlight two lines of action.Firstly, part of the action is focused on improving the support and delivery of services to improvecitizens' perception of the Public Administration. Secondly, and directly linked to thetheories for the improvement of democracy, another part of the action is focused onstrengthening the view of transparency and accountability of government, thus creating newspaces and channels for citizen participation.Beneath these two lines, there are two perceptions of the concept of the citizen that in somesituations can be mutually exclusive: citizens as customers and as individuals with a seriesof political rights.a) Citizen as Customers: Trends and ProblemsCitizens' perception of Public Administrations can be explained by various factors. Firstly,according to various empirical studies, in general there is a direct positive relationship betweena country's living standards and its satisfaction with public bodies. Secondly, citizenshave a negative opinion about the Administration, in accordance with the generalised ideason the running of bureaucratic organisations, mainly linked to their most negative aspects:slowness, secretism, inefficiency, etc. (OCDE, 1991). Finally, and of particular interest to ushere, the perception of the Administration is finally built with the contact between citizensand the Administration, mainly in the provision of information and services. In this case, thedifference with the previous cases lies in the fact that the perception of the administration isgenerally based on direct experience, so that the conception of the Administration has morefavourable results. Since it is an environment based on experience, it is possible to have animpact on and improve it (OCDE, 1991).If we focus specifically on the Catalan Administration, various studies back up the previousopinion about the different perceptions of the population. 7 In the survey on citizens' opinionof the public function included in the White Paper on the Public Function (2006), 72.2% of7. http://www.idescat.net/cat/idescat/estudisopinio/rpeo/R-345.pdfhttp://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic
E-governance and Citizen Information 41 Theoretical Framework. The Network Administrationthose surveyed consider that the Public Administration is slow and 46.5% consider that it isvery strict in terms of compliance with regulations. However, 55% of those surveyed state thatthey have a “very good” or “good opinion” about the public service offices of the Generalitat.Therefore, there is a qualitative leap in citizens' generalised negative perception towards administrationsand a good opinion based on direct experience.Within this context, several years ago many administrations started to implement strategiesaimed at improving relationships with citizens through improved quality of information andservices. This happens in the environments addressing public services and the delivery ofthese services, especially in the spaces where citizens' image of the administration canhave a major impact. In this sense, the internal evaluation and quality regulation adaptationprocesses are more common in the public sector. In general, there is a new approach formost of the indicators that must guide the ideal running of the public sector, adapting themfrom the ones used in the private sector.The improved relationship with citizens has been possible thanks to the incorporation of valuesfrom private companies. As a result, not only do the parameters governing the internalrunning of the public sector change, there is also a reconfiguration of the figure of the citizen,who becomes a customer or a consumer of services. This change in approach is mainly introducedfrom the doctrines of NPM, in accordance with the concept of the focus on the customer(Osborne and Gaebler, 1994; Barzelay, 1992), obtaining an important acceptance inthe administration modernisation processes in any part of the world (initially in countriessuch as New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Norway, etc., recently extended to Asia, Africa, LatinAmerica, etc. [Barzelay, 1992]).This transformation aims to improve the activity of the Administration by paying greater attentionto the relationships established with its customers (Brugué et al., 1994). Therefore,despite the fact that citizens are used to a market that offers personalised products, the Administrationhas been traditionally characterised by offering products with no distinctions(Osborne and Gaebler, 1994). To face this situation, the NPM proposals aimed to offer citizenspublic services focused on the specific needs of each citizen.Electronic government initiatives adopted the NPM doctrines with the same emphasis on thefocus on the citizen, marking the need to improve the quality of services, access to information,creation of new interaction channels, etc. (Zweers and Planqué; Margetts and Dunleavy,2000). In this sense, as stated by Dunleavy and Margetts (2000) or Soete andWeehuizen (2003), ICTs and in particular Internet logic should take more account of the usersof the Administration and use their feedback for the re-engineering of the public services;while citizens and governments can follow the procedures directly with a disintermediationhttp://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic
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