Internet reporting and digital governance: evidence from multiple Italian municipalities

Information and communications technologies (ICT) provide new processes for managing public bodies. These allow municipalities to use voting platforms, web pages to share information with citizens, or social networks. Despite the widespread positivistic approach, before internet reporting some processes and partnerships enable good digital governance of public bodies. Consequently, understanding which variables promote good reporting and governance practices in municipalities is essential to guide citizens’ participation. Using a qualitative research method based on 20 Italian cities, our chapter demonstrates theoretical and practical connections between internet reporting and digital governance. We empirically demonstrate that the problem of how information is shared has been replaced by the problem of what is shown on public pages. Furthermore, we extract from the literature ten variables, such as transparency, interactive reports, ease of reading, accessibility of information, popular financial reporting, social networks, corruption policies, voting platforms, and open data policy that we subsequently field test by observing websites and social pages.