Analysis e-mail response Romanian MP's

If you send an e-mail to a Member of the Romanian Parliament (MP), you
have less than 10 percent chance to get a reply. That is, if the MP you
are trying to reach has a public e-mail address to start with. Only a
quarter of the representatives offers an electronic contact address. The
conclusion from an e-mail response study by the e-democracy forum gives
government a transparency-rating of only 0.29 (on a scale from 0 to 5).

The results are based on an complex analysis performed over the Internet,
between 1 October and 30 November 2003. Two rounds of e-mails were sent to
MP’s to analyse their responsiveness. The e-mails contained questions
about hot topics of the moment: the referendum for the New Constitution
and the conclusions of the European Commission Country Report for Romania.

The poll group was composed from the list of e-mail addresses published on
the official websites of the two chambers of the Romanian Parliament
(www.cdep.ro and www.senat.ro). The full list contained 123 public
addresses of Members of the Parliament, out of a total of 485 active MP’s.
For the 123 e-mails sent each time, the researchers have received 10
replies (8.1 percent) regarding the New Constitution and 12 replies
regarding the Country Report (9.7 percent).

The results are in sharp contrast with recent data from the European SIBIS
project (Statistical Indicators Benchmarking the Information Society) that
show that of all Europeans, Romanian citizens are the most willing to
interact online with public institutions. The researchers recommend
standards for electronic communication with citizens, starting with the
obligation for every MP to publish a contact address, activate an
auto-reply and stick to an agreed maximum reply period.

Results @Parliament study (in English, 19.02.2004)
http://www.edemocratie.ro/editoriale/eng/replyreaction.pdf

(Contribution by Bogdan Manolea, Romanian legal expert)