Significant socio-economic factors for local e-government development in Portugal

In this paper, we present an empirical study of local e–government in Portugal and an investigation of the socio–economic indicators that are most significant to explain its development. The websites of all Portuguese municipalities were analysed according to three dimensions: government information, service delivery and participation. The results were investigated using regression models to identify the socio–economic indicators that are most significant to explain development and clustering techniques to identify homogeneous groups of municipalities in what concerns that development. We identify the socio–economic factors that are most significant to explain the results of municipalities and the discriminating factors for development in each dimension of analysis. We also identify seven main profiles of municipalities with different median scores in the three dimensions, which allow us to validate our own methodology and, generically, the ordered stages paradigm of the majority of the existent e–government maturity models.