IMPACT OF NATIONAL CULTURE ON QUALITY OF GOVERNANCE DEVELOPMENT: THE ROMANIAN REALITY

In this paper, in order to understand how cultural values influence the quality of governance, alternative ways of measuring the cultural values and different indices to measure the quality of governance: Hofstede's model for cultural dimensions level and E-government Development Index are considered In a certain sense, E-government Development is seen as an input, which, modified by a series of contextual variables, interconnected from the point of view of infrastructure, economics, juridics and social, it is transformed into output, i.e. Good Governance. By using statistical methods of correlation and multivariate statistical analysis, such as cluster analysis, we consider that the national cultural practices influence the institutional environment, which, in its turn has an influence on macro-social variables. The approach of E-Government adoption and implementation is analyzed from the point of view of two theoretical perspectives: endogenous growth theory and institutional theory. Consistent with the theory, we find a strong relationship between these concepts; from the cultural dimensions only, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism and indulgence versus restraint affect the acceptance of E-government for Romania as an Eastern European Union country.