IT-enhanced popular reports: Analyzing citizen preferences

Popular reporting is a means of bringing local government financial information closer to citizens. Nevertheless, the interest of citizens on popular reports appears to be less than optimal. In this paper, we assess whether the use of modern technology and the Internet could boost citizens' interest in popular reporting, which in turn would potentially motivate them to have a more active participation in public issues. More specifically, we examine whether the presentation format of a given popular report has different value to users. Our analysis is based on earlier works performed in relation to reporting formats in the private sector. For this purpose, we develop a concise popular report for a hypothetical municipality under three different formats (traditional PDF, flipping book and website) and we set up a questionnaire to evaluate an array of aspects namely completeness of information, clarity of information, visual appearance, navigation, usability, overall satisfaction and municipality image in each one of them. The questionnaire was answered by a sample of 165 respondents. The findings show that the website format outperforms the traditional ways of a popular report presentation in the majority of aspects examined. Therefore, this study provides collaborative evidence that the use of ICT as a means of making popular reports more attractive and useful to citizens would yield positive results with possible spillover effects to democratic participation.