Local Governments Online and the Role of the Resident

This article explores the ways municipalities use the Internet as a new medium to interact with residents. Many local governments develop new tools to serve citizens’ needs for information, services, and participation. The Internet is developing fast as a means to realize all this at once, in one “place.” In Flanders, Belgium, there is a trend in electronic services for the government to reduce the citizen to a customer. Such important civic roles as being a voter and being a contributor to policy making are reduced to a minimum. Consequently, local government web sites are primarily one-way streams to the citizen as customer. The interactive possibilities of municipal web sites are neglected. This holds the risk that in future, local authorities will (voluntarily) neglect the democratic possibilities the Internet offers. In this way, they are developing an electronic government shop rather than the electronic community that some have predicted.