Origin & purpose
Existing instruments for measuring e-government — UN, EU, World Bank — are designed for international comparison and don't capture the texture of Romanian local administration. This index was built specifically for Romanian urban municipalities, evaluating front-office services that matter to residents and businesses: information, transactions, participation, and security.
The first wave was conducted in 2020 by Nicolae Urs and students of the Department of Public Administration and Management at FSPAC, UBB Cluj-Napoca. The instrument was refined slightly between waves but the core framework — five weighted categories totalling 46 indicators — has remained constant.
The 5-category framework
The 46 indicators are grouped into five thematic categories, each contributing a fixed share to the final 0–100 score. Weights reflect the relative importance the framework assigns to each dimension of an effective municipal website.
The 46 indicators
The institutional website of a City Hall is the main channel for digital service delivery. To evaluate it, our index contains 46 indicators. These are concrete, observable features of a city's official website. Within each category, raw points are summed and rescaled to a 0–100 score; those category scores are then combined using the published weights. The instrument uses three different scoring scales depending on the indicator: a simple yes/no, a high-importance pass/fail, and a five-level rubric. Each is illustrated in the next section.
Examples: "the website provides a fully online flow for paying local taxes" (Online services); "public consultation on draft decisions is visible on the homepage" (Participation); "the privacy policy explicitly identifies what personal data is collected" (Security).
Scoring rules
Each indicator is scored against a declared rubric while inspecting the live website. Three different scales are used across the instrument, depending on what the indicator measures. The three real examples below illustrate each.
Scale 1 — yes / no
Used where the indicator is a clear binary feature: it's either present on the site or it isn't. One point if present, zero if not.
Scale 2 — high-importance pass / fail
Used for features the framework treats as load-bearing for citizen experience — paying taxes online, valid HTTPS, mobile-responsive design. Same yes/no logic, but worth four points instead of one.
Scale 3 — five-level rubric
Used where the question is one of degree rather than presence — design quality, navigation, the depth of an open-data offering. The evaluator awards 0 to 4 points against a graded scale.
Within each category, raw points are summed and rescaled to 0–100. Those category scores are then combined using the weights shown in the framework diagram above to produce the final 0–100 score.
Evaluator protocol
Each city is evaluated by inspecting the official municipal website during a defined evaluation window for the wave. Only services that are fully functional at the moment of evaluation are awarded points — a city redesigning its website during the window may receive partial scores, and those caveats are noted in the data file.
To control for evaluator drift, every wave includes calibration sessions where two evaluators score the same set of cities and discrepancies are resolved against the rubric. A subset of cities is also re-evaluated at the end of each wave to verify consistency.
Limitations
The index measures presence and quality of online front-office services. It does not measure back-office digitization, internal workflow modernization, IT spending, or staff training. A city may digitize internally without that being visible on the website.
Scores are also a snapshot. A city in active redesign at the moment of evaluation may be temporarily underrepresented; conversely, a site that goes dormant after launch will score well briefly without being maintained. This is one reason waves are repeated.
Finally, indicator weights reflect the framework authors' view of what matters and were validated by an Expert Panel Weighting approach based on the Delphi method.
Change log between waves
Wave-over-wave deltas in this site are computed on the indicators that are common across waves. Indicators added or substantially reworded affect only the wave from which they were introduced.
Citing the index
An academic article based on this research is currently submitted for publication. Until then, you can cite this index in the suggested citation format shown in the sidebar. We will update this information after the paper is published.
