March 23, 1995 - Inside Politics



Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance

by

Darrell M. West

Director, Taubman Center for Public Policy

67 George Street

Brown University

Providence, RI 02912-1977

Darrell_West@brown.edu

(401) 863-1163

Princeton University Press, 2005

Table of Contents

Preface iv

List of Tables vii

List of Figures ix

1. Scope, Causes, and Consequences of Electronic Government 1

2. Bureaucratic, Fiscal, and Political Context 32

3. The Content of American Government Websites 60

4. Explaining E-Government Performance 89

5. The Case of Online Tax Filing 105

6. Public Outreach and Responsiveness 129

7. Citizen Use of E-Government 145

8. Trust and Confidence in E-Government 163

9. Global E-Government 177

10. Democratization and Technological Change 204

Appendix 230

I. Data and Methods 230

A. Coding Instructions for Government Website Content Analysis 230

B. National E-Government Survey Questions 233

II. Global E-Government Rankings 239

III. E-Government Best Practices 241

A. Top City Government Websites 241

B. Top State Government Websites 242

C. Top Federal Government Websites 243

D. Top Global Websites 244

Preface

The subject of digital government first came to my attention several years ago while searching public sector websites for information about online services. At that time, it struck me that many government websites were difficult to use and lacked a standard design for visitor navigation. Despite optimistic rhetoric regarding the so-called "e-government revolution", it was not clear to what extent the Internet was transforming public sector performance or democracy. Given the fact that electronic government still was in its infancy, it seemed an appropriate time to track government websites as well as how citizens were thinking about e-government.

This book looks at how e-government has developed and how the Internet compares with historical examples of technological change. Every time a new technology has emerged, there have been grandiose claims about its impact on society and politics. From the printing press in the 1500s to inventions such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, technical innovations often are said to produce a major transformation. At their creation, for example, both the telegraph and television were cited as new devices that would speed communication and alter the relationship between citizens and government.

It therefore is no surprise that the emergence of the Internet and other digital technology has led to speculation about its longer-term social and political consequences. Are they transforming government? How are they altering public sector performance? What are their ramifications for the way democracy functions? As the latest new technologies, scholars have attempted to determine what these inventions mean for our political system.

In this research, I examine the extent to which e-government has transformed the public sector, what the factors are that dictate the extent of change, and the ramifications of e-government for public performance and democracy. Basically, I suggest that e-government falls more within a model of incremental change than transformation. Using data on the content of government websites, citizen and bureaucrat attitudes towards e-government, expenditure data, case studies, an email responsiveness test, and aggregate multivariate analysis, I argue that like many past technologies, the Internet’s effect has been mediated by a variety of political forces. Factors such as group conflict, bureaucratic setting, and budget scarcity have slowed the rate of innovation and made it difficult for e-government to take advantage of the Internet’s revolutionary potential. This limits the transformational scope of the Internet and slows the diffusion of information technology.

A number of people helped me collect data on and think about the ramifications of e-government. Melissa Driscoll Nicholaus provided invaluable research assistance on this project. I also would like to thank the legion of students who put in long hours documenting the content of government websites: Kristine Hutchinson, Todd Auwarter, Nicole Scimone, and Melissa Iachan during Summer, 2000; Benjamin Clark, Kim O'Keefe, Julia Fischer-Mackey, Sherly Shapiro, Chris Walther, Shih-Chieh Su, Ebru Bekyel, and Mariam Ayad during Summer, 2001; Dylan Brown, Bill Heil, Jason Holman, Aiko Wakau, Julie Petralia, Joshua Loh, Ones Umut, Irina Paley, Marilia Ribeiro, and Yen-Ling Chang during Summer, 2002; and Erica Dreisbach, Joanne Chiu, Emily Boness, Carrie Bersak, Adam Deitch, Vanessa Wellbury, Toby Stein, Ones Umut, Irina Paley, Fredi Chango, and Yen-Ling Chang during Summer, 2003. In addition, Kim O'Keefe and Robert Mitzner helped gather materials for the case study of online tax filing.

I appreciate the assistance of the Council for Excellence in Government (especially President Patricia McGinnis) for making available the raw e-government data of their national public opinion surveys and the surveys of bureaucrats conducted by Peter Hart and Robert Teeter. These data were very valuable for studying citizen and administrator reactions to e-government.

Funding for this project was provided by the Brown University Taubman Center for Public Policy, the university's graduate school in the form of a Salomon Grant, and the Dean of the College office with its Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantship program. I also am grateful for funding provided by the Benton Foundation (to write a policy briefing report), the Washington Resource consulting company (for the online tax case study), and the World Markets Research Center (for the first year of the global e-government study).

Earlier portions of this research were published by the Public Administration Review in a January/February, 2004 article entitled “E-Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes”, Volume 64, number 1, pp. 15-27. I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint some of those results in this volume.

I appreciated the chance to try out portions of the arguments presented in this book to the following audiences: the American Political Science Association annual meeting in San Francisco (2001); the St. Petersburg, Russia E-Government conference (2002); St. Petersburg Technical University (2002); the Karelia National Library (2002), the Beirut, Lebanon E-Government conference (2002); the American University of Beirut (2002), Notre Dame University in Lebanon (2002), the North-West Academy of Public Administration in St. Petersburg, Russia (2003), and information technology officials in Taipei, Taiwan (2003) and Tokyo, Japan (2004). I received a number of helpful comments from people at these events.

Chuck Myers, political science editor at Princeton University Press, deserves a big thank you for his insightful commentary on this book. He made a number of suggestions that improved the content and organization of the argument. The same was true for the book’s reviewers. They helped me refine my argument and evidence presented in this volume. I am very grateful for their assistance.

List of Tables

Table 1-1 Most Frequently Visited Government Websites, February, 2001

Table 1-2 Number of Government Websites Studied in Content Analysis, 2000-2003

Table 2-1 Personal Involvement of Government Administrators in E-Government, 2000-2003

Table 2-2 Evaluations of E-Government by Government Administrators, 2000-2003

Table 2-3 Evaluation of E-Government by Bureaucrats and the General Public, 2000

Table 2-4 Percentage of Government Administrators Believing E-Government Would Change Various Public Sector Activities for the Better, 2000

Table 2-5 Most Positive Things to Emerge from E-Government in View of Government Administrators, 2000-2003

Table 2-6 Top E-Government Obstacles in View of Government Administrators, 2000-2003

Table 2-7 Information Technology Expenditures as Percentage of Total State Budget, 1998-2000

Table 3-1 Percentage of State and Federal Websites Offering Publications and Databases, 2000-2003

Table 3-2 Percentage of State and Federal Websites Offering Online Services, 2000-2003

Table 3-3 Average Number of Online Services at State and Federal Government Websites, 2003

Table 3-4 Percentage of State and Federal Government Websites with Privacy and Security Policies, 2000-2003

Table 3-5 Assessment of E-Government Privacy and Security Statements, 2001-2003

Table 3-6 Percentage of Government Websites Falling Within Each Grade Level, 2003

Table 3-7 Readability Level by Agency Type, 2003

Table 3-8 Percentage of Sites with Ads, User Fees, and Premium Fees, 2001-2003

Table 3-9 Overall State E-Government Performance, 2003

Table 3-10 Overall Federal Agency E-Government Performance, 2003

Table 3-11 Overall City E-Government Performance, 2003

Table 3-12 E-Government Performance by Level of Government, 2003

Table 3-13 E-Government Performance by Branch of Government, 2003

Table 3-14 E-Government Performance by Agency Type, 2003

Table 4-1 The Impact of Organizational, Fiscal, and Political Factors on the Number and Percentage of Online Services in the 50 States, 2003

Table 4-2 The Impact of Organizational, Fiscal, and Political Factors on Website Readability in the 50 States, 2003

Table 4-3 The Impact of Organizational, Fiscal, and Political Factors on the Quality of Privacy Policy in the 50 States, 2003

Table 4-4 The Impact of Organizational, Fiscal, and Political Factors on Overall E-Government Performance

in the 50 States, 2003

Table 4-5 Correlations between Privatization, Budget Deficits, and Various State E-Government Indicators, 2003

Table 5-1 Percent of State Income Tax Payers Who File Electronic Returns, 2002

Table 5-2 Percentage of Various States Filing Income Taxes Online, 1998-2001

Table 5-3 Development of Online Tax Filing in Various States

Table 7-1 Predictors of Citizen Evaluations of Government Website Quality, 2000

Table 7-2 Predictors of Citizen Usage of Federal, State, abnd Local Government Websites, 2000

Table 8-1 Impact of E-Government Usage on Citizen Attitudes, 2000

Table 8-2 Impact of E-Government Usage on Changes in Citizen Attitudes, 2000

Table 9-1 Percentage of Global Government Websites Offering Publications and Databases, 2001-2003

Table 9-2 Number of Global Government Online Services, 2001-2003

Table 9-3 Percentage of Global Government Sites Offering Online Services by Region of World, 2001-2003

Table 9-4 Average Number of Online Servicves Across Each Country’s Websites, 2003

Table 9-5 Percentage of Global Government Websites Offering Public Outreach, 2001-2003

Table 9-6 Email Responsiveness by Whether Website was in English Language, 2002

Table 9-7 Global E-Government Ratings by Region, 2001-2003

Table 9-8 Global E-Government Features by Region, 2003

Table 9-9 The Impact of Organizational, Fiscal, and Political Factors on Global Government Online Service Delivery and Privacy Policy, 2003

Tablel 9-10 The Impact of Organizational, Fiscal, and Political Factors on Overall Global E-Government Performance, 2003

Table 10-1 Most Popular Online Activities, 2001

Table A-1 Global E-Government Rankings by Country, 2003

List of Figures

Figure 1-1 E-Government Stages and Models of Technological Change

Figure 10-1 A General Model of Technological Change

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