E‐Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes

• Author: Darrell M. West
• Published date: 01 February 2004
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2004.00343.x
• Date: 01 February 2004

E-Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes 15

Darrell M. West

Brown University

E-Government and the Transformation of Service

Delivery and Citizen Attitudes

The impact of new technology on public-sector service delivery and citizens’ attitudes about gov-

ernment has long been debated by political observers. This article assesses the consequences of e-

government for service delivery, democratic responsiveness, and public attitudes over the last

three years. Research examines the content of e-government to investigate whether it is taking

advantage of the interactive features of the World Wide Web to improve service delivery, demo-

cratic responsiveness, and public outreach. In addition, a national public opinion survey examines

the ability of e-government to influence citizens’ views about government and their confidence in

the effectiveness of service delivery. Using both Web site content as well as public assessments, I

argue that, in some respects, the e-government revolution has fallen short of its potential to trans-

form service delivery and public trust in government. It does, however, have the possibility of

enhancing democratic responsiveness and boosting beliefs that government is effective.

The impact of new technology on information access,

government service delivery, and public attitudes about

government has long been debated by observers. Each tech-

nological innovation—from the movable-type printing

press in the fifteenth century, the telegraph in 1844, and

the telephone in 1876, to the rise of radio in the 1920s and

coast-to-coast television broadcasting in 1946—has

sparked speculation about its longer-term social and po-

litical impact. Transformationalists often predict wide-

spread consequences arising from new technology, while

incrementalists note the constraining influence of social,

economic, and institutional forces on the ability of tech-

nology to alter behavior (Bowie 1996; Margolis and

Resnick 2000; Davis 1999).

In the debate over the transforming power of new tech-

nology, it is important to remember that change repre-

sents a continuum characterized by relative comparisons

of time and pace. There are three dimensions of change

that are important for new technology: long-term versus

short-term impact, big versus little shifts, and technocratic

versus political and institutional alterations. Given the

complexity of change assessments, it is difficult to deter-

mine how much innovation and how long a period of time

is required before something can be considered a “com-

plete change in character, condition,” the classic defini-

tion of transformation.

One thing that is clear about technological change dis-

cussions is that they often focus on the endpoints of change

comparisons, without looking at the direction and degree

of change or identifying which particular dimension of

change is being evaluated. Lindblom’s (1959) pathbreaking

work on “muddling through,” for example, focused on de-

cision-making processes. Is change rational and dictated

in key respects by economic trade-offs, or is it a political

process characterized by small-scale shifts constrained by

budgetary and institutional processes? Wildavsky (1984)

generalized Lindblom’s process model to policy outputs

and suggested that government policies typically evolve

through small-scale steps, not large-scale transformations.

Other authors have emphasized the importance of look-

ing at the middle of the change spectrum and proposed

models that outline how “constrained change” unfolds.

Quinn (1992) develops a model of “logical incremental-

ism,” which suggests that significant change can take place

within organizations on a step-by-step basis, even outside

of a revolutionary change model. In the same vein, Foun-

tain’s (2001a ) notion of “enacted technology” discusses

Darrell M. West is the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and

Public Policy and director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown

University. He is the developer of the Web site InsidePolitics.org, which fea-

tures in-depth analysis of city, state, federal, and global e-government. He is

the author of 11 books, including

The Rise and Fall of the Media Establish-

ment

(2001). E-mail: Darrell_West@brown.edu.