The electronic government performance of environmental protection administrations in Anhui province, China

•We evaluate e-government performance of environment agencies in the Anhui province.•A super-efficiency slacks-based measure approach was used to evaluate performance.•Public participation increases with better website service quality, and vice versa.•Only 4 out of the 16 environmental e-government websites performed efficiently.•Overall layout and service quality of e-government must be improved.

This study evaluates the e-government performance of environmental protection administrations in the 16 cities of the Anhui province based on an analysis of their websites. For this purpose, the study utilized a super-efficiency slacks-based measure (SBM) model based on three first-level indicators: the degree of public participation, website service quality, and public satisfaction. The rankings of these indicators indicate that the public participation and service quality of these e-government websites were highly consistent. In other words, the greater the public participation, the better the appraisals of service quality, and vice versa. However, the comprehensive performance analyses indicate that only 4 of the 16 e-government websites performed at the efficient frontier, while the remainder were inefficient. Therefore, e-government operations in the Anhui province must be improved to achieve efficiency.