Development of Municipal EGovernment and E-Democracy
Testing the usefulness and limitations of
stage models
Uwe Matzat & Gerrit Rooks
E-Government and E-Democracy
- “[…] e-government is defined as utilizing the internet and the worldwide-web for delivering government information and services to
citizens.” (Ronaghan, 2002: 1)
- “new and better government that is seen to be more responsive to
the needs of citizens and enterprises, more democratic, and more
efficient” (Bekkers & Homburg, 2007: 374)
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E-Government development
- practical need: benchmarking of municipal/regional/national egovernment
- theoretical need: determinants of e-government development
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E-Government theories
-literature dominated by “stage models”
-implicit assumption: e-government develops in linear way from
“simple” to “complex”
-simple: technology, organization, communication
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E-Government: stage models
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E-Government: stage models
Siau & Long (2005)
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Shortcomings of stage models
-not systematically based on empirical data
-lack of arguments for justification of stages or linearity assumption
-exception: Coursey & Norris (2008)
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Municipal e-government development
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Data on municipal e-government in the
Netherlands
-Data on adoption and evelopment of 311 Dutch municipalities from
2004-2009
-Annual website research by Dutch government agency (ICTU)
-Example: “Does the government agency publicize the periodic
announcements conform to the national standards on its website?”
(no/yes-searchable/yes-not searchable)
-Selection of 13 variables that describe website features
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Data on municipal e-government in the
Netherlands
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Mokken scale analysis with 4
e-government concepts
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Mokken scale analysis with 4
e-government concepts
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Mokken scale analysis with 13
e-government features
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Summary and Conclusions
• Support for model with 4 stages on macro level
• Linearity assumption holds on the aggregated level
• limited support for stage model on the level of the
website features: stage 4 features (e-democracy)
“too easy”
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Implications
(should the findings be replicated...)
• Development on level of feature cannot be ordered
according to communication dimension
• Stage models need explicitly formulated dimensions
that either focus on the aggregated level or the
feature level
• Technological complexity
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