Democracy and Bureaucracy in the Age of the Web: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Speculations

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2002 34: 411Administration & SocietyTodd M. la Porte, Chris C. Demchak and Martin de Jong

Democracy and Bureaucracy in the Age of the Web : Empirical Findings and Theoretical Speculations

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ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / September 2002La Porte / DEMOCRACY AND BUREAUCRACY IN WEB AGEThe foundations for governance in an information age are developing through theWorldWideWeb as it becomes the principal electronic public gateway into government organizations.Governmental openness is now important to a variety of strategies for governmental reform.TheWeb (a)makes governmentmore efficient; (b) facilitates the functioning of new network-like arrangements between public organizations, the private sector, and citizens; and (c) em-powers citizens to play a stronger role in interactingwith government.Wedescribe the conceptof organizational openness and summarize a methodology to measure it on a worldwide ba-sis.Data from1997 through 2000 are presented, showing rapid diffusion of theWeb and varia-tion in levels of openness, even across countries with similar levels of economic and politicaldevelopment. Bureaucracies adopt Web technologies as a function not of traditional diffusionprocesses, but of emergent institutional isomorphism. Short-term prospects for responsivegovernment improve, but so do unrealistic expectations affecting government legitimacy.

DEMOCRACY AND BUREAUCRACYIN THE AGE OF THE WEBEmpirical Findings andTheoretical Speculations

TODD M. LA PORTEGeorge Mason University

CHRIS C. DEMCHAKUniversity of Arizona

MARTIN DE JONGUniversity of Technology

CITIZEN EMPOWERMENT REFORMS ANDOPENNESS OF GOVERNMENT VIA WEB SITES

Government reform has been the subject of considerable academic andpractical discussion in recent years (Moe, 1995.; Osborne & Gaebler,

411

AUTHORS’NOTE:An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Polit-ical Science Association conference in Québec, Canada, on August 5, 2000.

ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY, Vol. 34 No. 4, September 2002 411-446© 2002 Sage Publications



1992; Peters, 2001; Peters & Pierre, 1998; Pierre, 1995; Thomas, 1998).In many circles, government is seen as inefficient, ineffective, or unre-sponsive to its social environment. Some argue that private-sector man-agement techniques can be applied to government, which will producepublic agencies that are more efficient, effective, and responsive to clientsthan compared with traditional government bureaucracies, which areunder less pressure to meet the needs of ordinary citizens.

At the same time, new ideas about governance have also emerged,stressing collaborative relationships, network-like arrangements, andhybrid public-private partnerships between various agencies and organi-zations, which enable more effective problem solving and greater citizenparticipation in public affairs than in the past (Koppel, 1999; Mechling,1994; O’Toole, 1997).

These two emerging schools of thought about public administrationand management both arise from the perception that administrative andpolitical environments have become far more complex than in the past,that existing structures and practices are failing to provide adequate ser-vices to communities and nations and depriving citizens of adequate lev-els of engagement in public affairs and government. These failures, inturn, threaten to delegitimate much of government’s traditional role insociety and have set off extensive debate about the appropriate role of gov-ernment at the end of the 20th century.

But in recent years, an additional conception of how to improve gov-ernment-citizens relations has emerged, broadly described as “citizenempowerment,” which aims to support citizens by providing them thefacilities to access government and policy information individually and tocontact responsible officials (Barber, 1984; Vigoda, 2000). Better contactand information in turn will promote better accountability of public offi-cials to citizens and produce fertile ground for reinvigorated civil society.This type of novel administration is often related to innovations in infor-mation technology, which would allow citizens to access public informa-tion and interact with officials and leaders via the Internet. For example,the Clinton and Blair administrations actively promoted direct access toand interaction with public agencies and authorities by competent citizensas a way to improve policy making and restore public confidence in gov-ernment (Kahin, 1997).

Students of political science and public administration have increas-ingly focused on the subject of information technology in government andits implications for democracy, for governance, and for public administra-tion (e.g., Danziger et al., 1982; Frissen et al., 1992; Garson, 2000; Pratchett,

412 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / September 2002



2000; Snellen & van de Donk, 1998; Weare, Musso, & Hale, 1999). Nev-ertheless, we argue that given current Internet and Web developments,more empirically grounded, large-scale research is needed in this fast-moving domain. In particular, we believe that important attributes of gov-ernance may be captured by tracking and evaluating the use of networkedinformation systems in public organizations, both internally, in terms ofbureaucratic structure and functioning, and externally, in terms of servicedelivery and citizen contact. Concepts that can bridge the various converg-ing domains of information technologies, public administration and pub-lic sector management, comparative political studies, and democratic the-ory may be needed to begin to bridge the conceptual divide betweendemocracy and bureaucracy, which has bedeviled public administrationistsand political scientists for decades (Appleby, 1952; Waldo, 1980; Woller,1998).

The concept of governmental openness is proposed here (and definedbelow) as a measure of governmental response to citizens’ demands forinformation and services from government organizations. Official infor-mation provision and transaction processing are the essence of govern-ment in many cases, and citizens depend on it for a variety of personal andbusiness purposes. Lack of openness by public organizations is likely tobe interpreted as unresponsiveness, inability, or unwillingness to serve cit-izens. Personal and frequent contact between citizens and public agencies,on the other hand, is likely to have a positive effect on the levels of citizens’trust in those agencies, suggesting that direct accessibility andinteractivity may be a viable option to reinvent government (Thomas,1998). Openness may also be considered one measure of governmentaccountability in that a government agency can be continuously assessedby citizens through everyday interactions.

We argue here that the World Wide Web is a useful vehicle to evaluatepublic organizations’ openness. It is a growing facet of the public face ofgovernment, and it increasingly instigates and reflects internal structuraland procedural dimensions of organizations’nonelectronic existence. It isnaturally not the only modality by which public and quasi-public institu-tions reach their stakeholders internally and externally, but it is increas-ingly the preferred option for reasons of relatively low cost and rapid turn-around. Hence, measuring the spread and qualities of openness by thespread of modern networked information technologies is a way to mea-sure the spread of administrative arrangements vital to emerging forms ofdemocratic governance.

La Porte / DEMOCRACY AND BUREAUCRACY IN WEB AGE 413



We also evaluate a variety of possible explanations for the observeddistribution and levels of openness worldwide. We test in multivariateregression models economic, political, legal, cultural, and technologicalvariables. We find that national income levels explain the greatest vari-ance, but that national income is highly correlated to a number of otherexplanations. We then address the possibilities that (a) openness may be anovel, previously unspecified independent variable tapping administra-tive or bureaucratic aspects of governance; and (b) that the varianceobserved may be due to processes of structuration and institutionalisomorphism.

CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISONOF WEB SITE OPENNESS

Openness is not operationally well defined in the literature on publicorganizations (Demchak, Friis & La Porte, 2000). Operational definitionshave not been proposed by many authors writing on electronic democracy(Beetham, 1993; Chapman & Hunt, 1987; Cleveland, 1985; Goddard &Riback, 1998; Grossman, 1995; Osborne & Gaebler, 1992;). “Demysti-fication” of public agencies (Lipsky, 1980), citizen access (Gentot, 1994)and entitlement to organization information, particularly on citizens’rights (Gruber, 1987) are the main contributions to the question of positiveapproaches to openness. Negative approaches’ emphasis that openness isnot always in the interest of public organizations (Martin, 1995; Mont-gomery & Overby, 1991; Sadofsky, 1990; Weber, 1946; Weiss, 1993),because it can lead to reducing organizational latitude in carrying out itsmission in the context of tight resources and bureaucratic conflict.

However, it is possible to derive from this literature a common set ofattributes and extract a composite general definition of openness, in par-ticular by using observations of Deutsch (1966) and Wilson (1989). In ourview, openness exists to the extent that an organization freely and univer-sally provides comprehensive information about all of its attributes andmaintains timely communications directly to all key public audiences.

The Cyberspace Policy Research Group (CyPRG) has surveyed annu-ally since 1997 all national level government Web operations to assess (a)how widespread the Web has penetrated government organizations and(b) how the Web technologies have been implemented in each organiza-tion and country. This research complements our theoretical work onwebbed organizations (Friis, Demchak & La Porte, 1998), and seeks to




https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280982957_The_Electronic_Republic?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291957240_Reinventing_government?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==

provide a strong empirical support to it. In particular, the research teamhas measured the degree of openness of each site, according to the WebsiteAttribute Evaluation System (WAES). WAES provides measure of a vari-ety of Web site attributes, principally Web site transparency and Web siteinteractivity, the two components of openness (Demchak, Friis, & LaPorte, 2000).

As defined above, and as we have previously used it, openness is theextent to which an organization provides comprehensive informationabout its attributes and maintains timely communications with its variouspublics (Demchak et al., 2000). Openness is a potentially unique measureof organizational behavior or performance especially suited for analyzingthe current wave of political and administrative reform. In this article, theconcept of openness is explored more fully than in previous work and istested against a variety of hypotheses about the correlates of openness thatwill help to determine its uniqueness and its explanatory value.

Earlier work described the WAES methodology, data, and preliminaryfindings (Demchak et al., 2000), which are briefly summarized here.WAES permits the evaluation of any Web site by testing for the presenceof a number of specific attributes, described below. A “1” is scored forinstances of the attribute, a “0” when it is not detected. There are 46 ques-tions in all, which enables a site to be evaluated relatively quickly by cod-ers with relatively simple training. All organizations are evaluated in thesame 3-month time frame.

TRANSPARENCY

Transparency refers to the availability of information for navigating alarge-scale social system. It constitutes a layman’s basic map of the orga-nization as depicted in the information on the site. The five elements ofWeb-based transparency are outlined below and are listed in order ofincreasing difficulty for an organization to provide. These five subelementsof WAES reveal something about the Web activities of the organization,the depth of access it allows, the depth of knowledge about processes it iswilling to reveal, and the level of attention to citizen response it provides.

Ownership. This element tests for evidence of how involved theagency is with the site. The aim to ascertain if the agency itself is tailor-ing the material for the site or has shunted these content decisions tosomeone else, such as a central government bureau. Agencies that owntheir own Web operations are more likely to consider it a key part of their




organization compared with those that leave the development of their Website to others.

Contact information. Designed to assess the Web site visitor’s abilityto contact individuals or positions inside the organization, this attribute in-dicates the agency’s willingness to permit outsiders to reach inside the or-ganization beyond the Webmaster gateway and thereby to see inside theorganization in a more detailed way. Agencies vary greatly in their ap-proaches to contact with outsiders, with some willing to provide detailedcontact information, whereas others prefer to centralize it by providing aone-stop-shop point of contract.

Organizational or operational information. This assesses how well in-formation is provided about an organization’s operations and its connec-tion with related organizations or information. The criteria test for indica-tions of where an organization is headed and how it is structured. This is inpart revealed by use of vision and mission statements, organizationalcharts, and perhaps most important, reports and texts of laws and regula-tions. Here, the agency indicates its understanding of the scope of its oper-ating and policy environment by including links to other agencies ornongovernmental organizations relevant to its own work and therefore tothe public at large. By charting this subset of attributes, we can study theevolution of governmental Web-based networks.

Citizen consequences. The element that defines what the organizationrequires of a citizen to comply with regulations or laws, to take advantageof programs, or to use government services. For example, showing whichforms on the site are required demonstrates that an agency is actively an-ticipating citizens’ needs. This set of criteria relate to the effort that anagency makes to present information and services to citizens most di-rectly. Doing so generally takes considerable organizational resources.

Freshness. This element assesses how up-to-date an agency’s informa-tion is by looking at how frequently key pages of the site are changed.Keeping a site up to date is costly in personnel time. The more elaboratethe site, the more costly it is to maintain. The more frequently it is updated,the more likely it is that an agency’s managers regard the site and its ser-vices as essential parts of the agency’s activities. The more that opennessvia the Web is endorsed by the agency in practical terms such as budgetedpersonnel, the more likely its site will be kept up to date. These attributesare summarized in Table 1.




INTERACTIVITY

Interactivity is a measure of the level of convenience or degree ofimmediate feedback, which is the second component of openness. Themore interactive the site is across the first four transparency attributes, thegreater is the demonstrated level of agency concern for the convenience ofthe citizen and the speed of communications between the agency and itsclients. Interactivity assesses the extent to which elements of transparencyare “clickable” for a site visitor. The greater the “click value,” the moreconvenient it is to acquire data or interact with the agency and thus themore the agency encourages the client to make use of the site and theagency itself. Interactivity questions roughly parallel those for transparency.Ownership asks if the organization’s addresses are also hotlinked for

ease of citizen contact with the agency itself.Reachability focuses on the extent the organization permits the client

to electronically reach inside the agency with clickable dialog boxes or


TABLE 1

Web Operations and Organizational Transparency

Item Description

Site ownership Tests to see how involved the agency is with the site: Is theagency taking charge of the site itself, indicatinginvolvement and resource expenditure, or is the site thecreature of some other entity?

Contact information Tests whether individuals or positions inside the organiza-tion can be reached by outsiders: Is address or positioninformation available for people beyond theWebmaster?

Organizational oroperational information

Tests for information about the organization’s operations orits role in a wider issue network: Can users get informa-tion about (a) the agency’s own goals and structure and(b) about other groups, in or outside the government,that play roles in the policy arena?

Citizen consequences Tests the extent to which the organization indicates whatcitizens are required to do to comply with laws or regu-lations, and helps them to do so: Can users get texts oflaws, rules or other requirements, instructions, forms, orapply to appeals processes?

Freshness Tests how up to date this information is by looking at howfrequently key pages of the site are changed: Can usersknow how closely a site is attended, and thus how com-plete, reliable, accurate, and up to date it is?



hotlinks; for example, whether senior officials are listed with activehotlinked e-mail addresses.Organizational or operational information measures how rapidly the

user can navigate inside the organizational structure or wider issue com-munity via the site. This criterion tests the extent to which the agencybegins to demonstrate sophistication in both its concept of citizen involve-ment in the agency’s operations and in the scale of investment in technicalsophistication to achieve openness.Responses is the clickable correlate to transparency’s citizen conse-

quences element. It assesses the extent to which citizens can easily reviewand input or receive responses to these consequences. This section is themost challenging in terms of technical sophistication and in willingness ofthe agency to accept input from external sources. One criterion tests for aparticularly courageous level of openness. It asks if the agency has made acitizen’s appeal process open to online submission. A relatively uncon-strained online appeal process with automatic agency reply deadlinesrequires substantial changes to internal processes and budgets to accom-modate these demands. This feature indicates unprecedented agency sup-port for both openness and for the new technology. Interactivity attributesare presented in Table 2.

The specific Web site attribute evaluation criteria the project team usedto gather data are listed in Appendix A.

DATA

Since its introduction in 1992, the Web has been expanding rapidlythroughout governments around the world. In 1999, the Web was detectedin 101 countries and in nearly 1,000 ministry-level organizations. Theaverage number of Web sites per country in 1997 was just over 2, over 3 in1998, and more than 4 in 1999.1 Preliminary indications for 2000 are thatthere is a substantial increase in the number of agency Web sites world-wide. They show that the United Kingdom and the United States are virtu-ally even in the number of national-level government Web operations, atabout 330 (see Table 3). Other heavily Webbed governments include suchdiverse nations as India, Australia, Canada, and Japan. The United States,Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain stand out as having large num-bers of regional or municipal governments online. U.S., German, and Bra-zilian courts also appear to be widely deployed on the Web. North Amer-ica, Western Europe, and East Asia, including Australasia, have themajority of national agency sites in the world, but the Middle East and




Southwest Asia have experienced strong growth in the past 2 years. Thenumber of government agencies online in Latin American is also increas-ing, with Argentina and Brazil taking the lead. The bulk of countries withfew or no national-level Web sites are in sub-Saharan Africa, the Carib-bean, and the Pacific.

There are no immediate explanations for the pattern in Table 3. Thesize of countries may bear some relation to the numbers of national gov-ernment Web sites, but this effect is mitigated by the fact that large coun-tries certainly do not usually have more ministries. This does not explainwhy Portugal has more Web sites than Spain, Canada, or France, forexample. Second, national wealth is strongly related to Web site density,but this correlation is not perfect. Why would Malaysia, Thailand, and thePhilippines have greater numbers than Denmark, Ireland, or Norway?

Although the Web is present in all wealthy countries, the level of open-ness in government agencies varies considerably. In Figure 1, countries


TABLE 2

Web Operations and Organizational Interactivity

Item Description

Ownership Tests whether the agency has provided clickable e-mailaddresses: Can a user simply click on a link or buttonon a Web page and compose an e-mail message to thepeople most closely associated with the Web operationor other official?

Reachability Tests the extent to which the organization permits users toreach deeply inside the agency to a variety of staff: Canusers click on links to a number of different staff mem-bers or participate in chat rooms or discussion lists?

Organizational oroperational information

Tests how smoothly users can find their way around theorganization’s structure or the wider issue area: Canusers click on and download mission statements, clickon addresses of a wide range of other organizationsdealing with the issue in or outside government, or eas-ily find archived information?

Responses Tests for interactive or clickable means to access informa-tion about citizen consequences as described below andtests the extent to which these consequences are madeeasy for a citizen to review and respond to: Can a userclick on a hotlinked organization chart, downloadinstructions on complying with the law, downloadforms, complete forms online, and connect to appealsprocesses?



TABLE 3

Top 50 Countries by Number of National-Level Web Operations, 1998

National Regional, Municipal Government, Political Embassies,Country Government Other Institutions Law Courts Parties Consulates

United Kingdom 334 623 3 105 80United States 332 4,000 (est.) 131 48 228India 319 144 7 20 48Australia 153 14 7 34 41Canada 140 29 5 32 52Japan 140 1 2 14 99Sweden 137 156 147 32Germany 135 1,074 69 255 51Italy 125 111 8 127 186Argentina 120 61 8 28 15France 118 128 13 70 255Malaysia 116 35 20 8Portugal 114 92 5 17 14Thailand 106 –3 4 43Philippines 105 5 2 1 19Switzerland 102 123 7 102 6Denmark 99 65 59 45Korea, South 98 13 2 4 26New Zealand 95 37 22 7Spain 91 270 3 114 30Ireland 88 24 2 14 4Singapore 87 3 3 10Brazil 86 165 35 39 32

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Norway 80 46 32 18Netherlands 76 131 2 57 59Finland 75 51 4 21 44Chile 74 8 7 18Taiwan 71 23 1 8 78Mexico 65 116 20 13 33South Africa 65 28 21 35Estonia 62 21 2 11 5Colombia 60 9 1 1 15Turkey 60 21 18Slovenia 59 2 8 5Poland 56 3 20 41Belgium 55 104 2 29 18Indonesia 55 1 19 23Greece 53 25 11 18Luxembourg 47 4 11 4Peru 45 3 2 5 15Mauritius 43 0 3 2Brunei 43 –1 1Austria 42 133 1 52 38Israel 41 11 2 18 37China 41 4 1 19Latvia 41 3 5 4Czech Republic 40 13 2 18 9Bulgaria 40 0 1 1 3Iceland 35 13 2 11 4Russia 23 49 3 10 17

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Transparency

Interactivity

Canada

Denmark

France

Germany

United States

Monaco

Netherlands

Ireland

South Korea

Norway

Angola

Turkey

Portugal

Australia Jordan

South Africa

Belize

Uganda

UzbekistanPakistan

Guatemala

Poland

Lithuania

Latvia

Nepal

Albania

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Croatia

Cyprus

Slovenia

Malaysia

Romania

Bulgaria

Paraguay

Dominica

Slovakia

Malta

San Marino

SwitzerlandUnited Arab

Emirates

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Maldives

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Senegal Algeria

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a Swedenb Egyptc Uruguayd Indiae Omanf Sri Lankag Belgiumh Ecuadori Peruj Kuwaitk Venezuela

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SpainBrazil

United KingdomHungary

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l Bangladeshm Chinan Fijio Boliviap Taiwanq Bahrainr Yemen, Rep. ofs Philippinest Thailandu Saudi Arabiav Tunisiaw Vaticanx Austriay New Zealand

Number of ministrieswith web operations

= 1, 5, 10, 15, 20

Azerbaijan

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Figure 1: Openness and Its Components: Transparency, Interactivity, and Number of Ministries

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are arranged along the two major dimensions of openness, transparencyand interactivity. The size of each country’s bubble indicates the numberof ministries in each country that have a public Web operation, whichshows the reach of the Web. These three measures show average nationallevels of openness and are thus amenable to comparison with other statesand use in international statistical evaluations.

This chart shows a number of aspects of ministry Web operations. It isnot surprising to find that transparency and interactivity are roughly corre-lated. If managers have the authority to release information and the abilityto broadcast it, it is natural for them to consider doing both. However,transparency is consistently about twice as high as interactivity. This sug-gests that managers are concentrating on making information availablerather than investing in making it convenient for external stakeholders toacquire. On one hand, the explanation for this lessened emphasis couldsimply be organizationally stretched resources. The back office and otherorganizational requirements for higher levels of electronic interactivityare likely to be substantially greater than for providing basic electronicaccess through merely reading a Web site (Sproul & Kiesler, 1991; Tur-ban, McLean, & Wetherbe, 1999).

It is also possible, however, that managers are actively manipulatingthe ease of access to some information or to some segments of their orga-nization over others. There are distinct differences in approach to inter-activity among similar nations. Canada is relatively more interactive thanit is transparent, whereas Australia, at roughly the same level of inter-activity, is far more transparent. Yet both countries share many cultural,political and economic characteristics, so we may infer that the differ-ences may relate to policy choices each government is making withrespect to openness. This begs an answer to the question to what extentthese differences are enduring features of government behavior, or whetherthey are due to momentary lags in technology application, familiarity withnew processes, or other transitory phenomena.

Most countries up to now are not using the Web very extensively. Theglobal average score for transparency in 1998 was 7.4 of a possible 21, andfor interactivity it was 2.6 of a possible 18. The cluster pattern of countriessuggests, however, that there has been considerable learning taking place.This assessment is corroborated by field interviews with Webmasters invarious countries.

Inspection of the figure, however, reveals some nonintuitive observa-tions. For example, among Scandinavian countries, openness levels rangefrom Denmark—by far the leader in governmental openness—to Sweden—




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whose ministries score about average for all sites found worldwide, along-side Egypt, India, and Uruguay. Other Nordic countries fall in betweenthese two extremes. Finland also has a more modest national governmentWeb presence than might have been predicted from the vigor of its com-mercial and local Internet activity. Similarly, France is among the leadersin openness, though its strong statist traditions and traditional nonvirtualadministrative structures are not known for their transparency to citizenscrutiny, and where even Parliament is largely a bystander in the policyprocess. Furthermore, it is at first glance surprising that the members ofAnglo-Saxon group scatter so strongly all around the plot, with the UnitedStates and the United Kingdom being so much in the lead and New Zea-land and Canada lagging behind. Here, traditional, often useful typologiesand categories such as families of nations or types of democratic states donot do a very good job in grouping affiliated countries together (Castles,1993; de Jong, 1999).

We also note that countries with more ministries on the Web are likely tohave been earlier adopters of electronic technologies in government, per-haps having an articulated government policy on a national informationinfrastructure or information society, such as the United State, Denmark,Singapore, and the Netherlands (Kahin & Wilson, 1997). However, havingmore ministries on the Web does not necessarily mean greater transparencyor interactivity, as in the cases of Israel, Malaysia, Slovenia, and Pakistan.Agency Webmasters and their managers are clearly making decisionsabout content as well as the forms of interactivity (Demchak et al., 2000).

HYPOTHESES FOR EXPLAINING WEB SITE OPENNESS

Contributions to international comparative analysis of public policieshave been made by several disciplines without being put together into anintegrated whole. Economics has produced comparative data and expla-nations on growth rates, gross domestic product (GDP) levels, publicspending, and computer ownership, and anthropologists have focused oncultural dimensions to get a feel for differences in values and normsbetween countries. In comparative law, legal families have been distin-guished to shed light on how administrative procedures are followed.

In this section, eight different hypotheses are presented, followed by abrief discussion of the multivariate and logistic regression analyses per-formed to assess their utility in explaining why countries exhibit various




https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262248395_The_Internet_and_the_National_Information_Infrastructure?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==

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degrees of openness. Variables to be tested are given in capital letters, anddata sources are described in detail in Appendix B.

HYPOTHESIS 1: NATIONAL INCOME

National income (GDPCAP97) may be a predictor of national govern-mental openness, as is suggested in part by the position of a number ofwealthy countries in Figure 1. Citizens and governments of rich countriescan buy new technologies more easily than others, and they are likely toable to experiment more easily with new, more professional and advancedinformation infrastructure. Therefore, it is expected that national income,measured by GDP per capita, will be a predictor of openness.

HYPOTHESIS 2: CENTRAL GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES

The size and importance of central government might also explain inpart degrees of government openness, not so much because it expresses awillingness to be open as it suggests the capacity to provide the technicaland organizational support necessary. In states with high central govern-ment expenditures relative to GDP (CGEGDP), the state might be expectedto use a portion of the resources flowing through its hands to support newprograms of technical change. In addition, citizens of such states mightdemand that their governments be more open about their activities becausethese states are a larger presence in all aspects of political, social, eco-nomic, and cultural life. In this respect, we might find a complementaryrelationship between central government expenditures and degree ofdemocracy in society. It is a reflection of public spiritedness in some sense.

HYPOTHESIS 3: INTEGRATION WITH THE WORLD ECONOMY

Openness in government ministries might also be related to countries’openness to the world economy, as expressed through a variety of relatedmeasures: amount of trade (TRADE), private capital flows (PRIVK), andforeign direct investment (FDINVEST), expressed as a percentage ofcountries’ GDP (Katzenstein, 1985). Countries with few barriers to out-siders often have high levels on some or all these measures, and their par-ticipation in tightly linked international economic relationships dependson relatively transparent information about market, political, and socialconditions.




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In addition, high levels of communication exports and imports(COMEXP), specifically of financial and related services (FINEXP), maysignal specific kinds of openness because they reflect information-inten-sive services rather than commodity and travel exports. Because govern-ment services are generally information related, particularly in Web oper-ations, it may be that a country’s degree of openness along these economicand trade dimensions is associated with openness in government adminis-tration as well.

HYPOTHESIS 4: SCIENCE, RESEARCH, AND EDUCATION

Countries with well-developed research systems are likely also to havewell-developed systems of disseminating information and creating newknowledge. The number of scientists and engineers in research and devel-opment (SCIENG) in a society, or the amount of national resourcesdevoted to research and development (RDEXP), also reflects a society’slevel of technical capacity. Well-developed research and developmentsystems may be associated with government openness because of both aculture of information exchange on which the scientific enterprisedepends and on an adequate supply of people to design, implement, andoperate highly complex technical systems of the sort that the World WideWeb is based. In addition, the level of public spending on education(EDUC) may also be an indicator of national effort in developing andsharing information, as well as technical capacity to take advantage ofnew technologies.

HYPOTHESIS 5: COMPUTERS AND INTERNET HOSTS

Without sufficient computing resources (COMPUTER) and communi-cations networks in place in a society, particularly Internet facilities(NETHOST), there is not likely to be much point for any organization,public or private, to take the trouble to get on the Web. With no demand foraccess to digital information, there is likely to be no supply. But where theproportion of computers and Internet hosts is high, there is likely to begreater demand for services to be provided over them, from both the pri-vate and public sectors. It is also likely that computers and Internet hostsare associated with national income; however, all things being equal, com-puter ownership probably has a more direct relationship to specific infor-mation service provision than does GDP.




HYPOTHESIS 6: CULTURAL VALUES

Cultural norms in different countries affect, in the aggregate, a varietyof important public attitudes and behaviors. Research on culture in organi-zations suggests that high levels of individualism in cultures (INDIVID)are associated with such individualistic ideas as rights to privacy, equalityunder the law, limitations on the role of the state, individual consultationof citizens instead of through group representation, and the like (Hofstede,1997; Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1998). Individualist culturesmay have higher levels of governmental openness because individual citi-zens have more direct and unmediated relationships with the governmentthan citizens in more collectivist countries, where group and family rela-tions matter more and consultation may take a different form.

Masculine culture (MASCUL), or rather its opposite, feminine culture,is an additional potential influence on government agency openness. Mas-culine cultures tend to resolve conflicts by fighting, whereas feminine cul-tures tend to use compromise and negotiation. Masculine cultures tend tostress money and things, whereas in feminine cultures, relationships mat-ter much more. These characteristics might be associated with govern-ment openness to the extent that such openness arises from impulses toshare and build relationships among various groups in society. Countriesthat are both individualistic and feminine are likely to score high on open-ness, according to this hypothesis.

Societies with high postmaterialist values levels (POSTMAT) couldalso be linked to high levels of openness. Postmaterialism in Inglehart’swork (Inglehart, 1997) is associated with aesthetic and intellectual valuesand high levels of self-esteem and belonging. In contrast, materialism isconcerned with safety and sustenance. In particular, people with strongpostmaterialist values believe in the importance of having a say in govern-ment, the community, and on the job, whereas materialists spend less timeon giving meaning to society’s ideals of less concern to their direct mate-rial benefit. Postmaterialistic values may be associated with openness dueto this belief in the importance of participation, especially because of thefact that postmaterialists participate less in conventional party politics andhave less trust in traditional government institutions. Unmediated rela-tionships between the public and government organizations may be pre-ferred by people with high levels of postmaterialism.

Finally, interpersonal trust (TRUST) may be related to openness. Highlevels of trust among citizens may make it easier for information to circu-late because it would be less likely to be used for individual or group




https://www.researchgate.net/publication/201382219_Riding_the_Waves_of_Culture_Understanding_Cultural_Diversity_in_Global_Business?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44819785_Cultures_and_Organizations_The_Software_of_the_Mind?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272159941_Modernization_and_Postmodernization_Cultural_Economic_and_Political_Change_in_43_Nations?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==

advantage. Societies with high levels of mistrust may be characterized byinformation husbanding and lack of willingness to cooperate in collectiveendeavors. Although trust is associated positively with postmaterialism inthe developed countries, it is negatively related in the developing world,and in neither case are they colinear.

HYPOTHESIS 7: DEMOCRACY

Democracies are more likely to be politically open than other forms ofgovernment. In democracies, citizens have certain civil liberties and polit-ical rights and enjoy the rule of law and regular elections. Democracieshave a free press and media and few restrictions on circulation of informa-tion among citizens. Therefore, it is expected that countries with high lev-els of democracy (DEMOC), or high levels of political rights and civil lib-erties (POLCIV), are more likely to have more open governmentorganizations than those that do not.

In addition, the percentage of the population voting in parliamentaryelections (VOTING) may be an indicator of openness because voting infree and fair elections is a fundamental to participation in democratic sys-tems. Countries in which large fractions of the population vote can bethought of as countries in which citizens expect to have and exercise theirrights of participation, and in which they might also be expected to havecloser relationships with government bodies than elsewhere. Others arguethat voting levels are an indication of citizen alienation from government,where low voter turnout reflects a sense of futility in affecting political lifeand high turnout indicates high levels of citizen efficacy, and that such dis-affection is increasing generally.

HYPOTHESIS 8: LEGAL SYSTEM

In addition to the type of regime, a country’s legal system may also playa role in how open its administration is. In this analysis, five main legalsystem types have been included. COMMON represents British commonlaw; CIVIL represents all variations of civil or Roman law; ISLAMIC rep-resents those countries that rely on the sharia, the legal principles set outin the Koran; SOCIALIST indicates those countries whose legal system isbased on socialist principles; and FRMSOCST are those countries thathave recently broken with socialism and are now seeking to put civil lawcodes in its place. To reduce the number of categories in this dimension, itwas decided to group SCAN and other separately recognizable and yet




relatively similar legal traditions together as CIVIL. These include theNapoleonic Code, Spanish law, Italian law, German law, Swiss law,Roman-Dutch law, and Roman law itself. Legal traditions are coded in thisdata as dummy variables.

As it can be expected from the theoretical considerations above that, inprinciple, all eight hypotheses might have something to do with openness,the following section will present the results of statistical analysis.

HYPOTHESIS TESTING

Due to the apparent influence of national income on other variables ofpotential interest, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop-ment (OECD) countries have been separated from the overall data set andanalyzed separately. Likewise, countries with and without governmentWeb sites were analyzed to determine what factors account for Web sitepossession.

At this point in the analysis, it is necessary to use a number of straight-forward statistical techniques to analyze the data. These are mainly inspec-tion of Pearson product-moment correlation tables and the use of ordinaryleast squares regression, both with unlogged and logged variables to com-pensate for heteroskedasticity in the data, particularly for developing coun-tries. The reader not inclined to follow the analysis through this section mayskip to the section that discusses the evaluation of the hypotheses.

OECD COUNTRIES

After removing the obviously colinear variables, the most inclusivemodel is shown in Table 4.

Note that in this initial model, no single variable is significant. Theoverall model, as indicated by the low adjusted R2 score and F ratio,explains little of the variation observed in the OPEN+98 variable. A num-ber of cases have missing data, reducing the overall size of the sample con-siderably. Using the correlation matrix results as an initial guide, followedby t ratio and significance tests, the model in Table 5 is respecified toreduce it to its essential components.

Note that COMPUTER and LPRIVK are the only variables that arerobustly and significantly related to OPEN+98, accounting for 26% and30% of the variance, respectively. However, when both are evaluatedtogether, only LPRIVK is significant. COMPUTER and LPRIVK are




reasonably colinear with national income, so we may conclude generallythat some combination of national income and globalization are the onlysignificant identified factors influencing openness, accounting for a littlemore than a quarter of the observed variance in the OECD countries.

NON-OECD COUNTRIES

As noted previously, because the OECD countries have high levels ofnational income, we have evaluated non-OECD countries separately inour tests of factors influencing openness. The correlation matrix and themultivariate regressions for all hypothesized variables for the non-OECDcountries are given in Table 6. The log of OPEN+98 was used becauseOPEN+98 was not normally distributed in the non-OECD countries. Aftertesting all independent variables for heteroskedasticity, some were log-transformed to correct for non-normal distribution. The variables werealso tested for multicolinearity.

As with the OECD countries, none of the variables in this model aresignificant either, and the model has few degrees of freedom. Extendedtesting and respecification of the model yields the most parsimoniousmodel in Table 7.


TABLE 4

Correlation Matrix and Multivariate Regressionsfor all Hypothesized Variables for the Member Countries of

the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Item Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Ratio

Regression 193.769 7 27.7 1.53Residual 162.368 9 18.0409

Variable Coefficient SE of Coefficient t Ratio

Constant 4.51397 8.854 0.510INDIVID 0.025669 0.1036 0.248POSTMAT 0.148902 0.2857 0.521POLCIV –0.712440 1.002 –0.711COMMON 2.12592 4.817 0.441LPRIVK 7.67576 7.338 1.05LFDINV 2.63054 1.793 1.47COMPUTER –0.000157 0.0179 –0.009

*p > .05. **p > .01. ***p > .005. Adjusted R2 = 18.9%.



The log of GDP per capita, LGDPCAP97, is the only robust and signif-icant variable, explaining about 27% of the observed variance in opennessscores in the non-OECD countries. Thus, as in the OECD countries,national income is the primary factor explaining openness. As with theOECD countries, it too accounts for about a quarter of the observed vari-ance in the sample.

EVALUATION AND DISCUSSION

Overall, only those hypotheses relating to national income or wealthhave a bearing on openness in both OECD and non-OECD countries,either directly or via computer ownership. The hypothesis on global link-ages also plays a role in explaining openness, but it is likely that it isrelated to national income because the world’s wealthier countries tend to


TABLE 5

Respecified Correlation Matrix and Multivariate Regressionsfor all Hypothesized Variables for the Member Countries of

the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development


Regression 160.800 1 161 10.2***Residual 394.162 2 15.7665


Constant 6.81886 1.530 4.46COMPUTER 0.020225 0.0063 3.19***Adjusted R2 = 26.1%

Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Ratio

Regression 179.723 1 180 11.9***Residual 363.327 24 15.1386


Constant 3.08844 2.470 1.25LPRIVK 6.55501 1.902 3.45***

*p > .05. **p > .01. ***p > .005. Adjusted R2 = 30.3%.



have more liberal trading regimes. None of the other hypotheses are sup-ported by this data (see Table 8).

Therefore, even though we find reasonably robust results for a linkbetween openness and national income, we still do not have a very satisfy-ing explanation of its sources. We do not know what it is about nationalincome or wealth that produces more open government organizations.The wide variety of more specific proposed mechanisms all fail to predictthe patterns we observe in the data.

Having eliminated these hypotheses, we propose an alternative one:that openness is a unique aspect of organizational behavior, not derivativeof any other cultural, political, or economic factor. Openness may be a sig-nificant indicator of underspecified attributes of public organizationalbehavior, attributes that are of increasing interest to social scientists, pol-icy makers, and citizens alike. It is particularly interesting to consider thispossibility in a transformational era in which governments and individuals


TABLE 6

Correlation Matrix and Multivariate Regressionsfor all Hypothesized Variables for the Nonmember Countries

of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development


Regression 2.08630 13 0.16048 1.52Residual 0.423231 4 0.105808


Constant 2.14651 2.087 1.03INDIVID –0.016215 0.0219 –0.741POLCIV –0.017750 0.0647 –0.274COMMON 0.466874 0.6645 0.703CIVIL 0.045986 0.3156 0.146LGDPCAP97 –0.602949 0.5909 –1.02LCGE96 –0.048489 1.060 –0.046LTRADE –0.795029 0.7752 –1.03LPRIVK 0.704394 0.7419 0.949COMEXP 0.005964 0.0135 0.443LSCIENG 0.155704 0.8800 0.177LRDEXP –0.739427 0.6252 –1.18LEDUC 0.814666 2.181 0.374LNETHOST 0.342229 0.3287 1.04

*p > .05. **p > .01. ***p > .005. Adjusted R2 = 28.3%.



in public institutions have the ability via the Web to learn more about theircompatriots in other nations than previously. Just as national regime type,level of economic development, degree and form of integration with theworld economy and the like are useful indicators for economic or politicaldevelopment, we believe that openness may be such an indicator ofadministrative behavior that has utility for improving governance.

In a sense, it is remarkable that some the proposed explanations, espe-cially those related to legal, political, and cultural variables, appeared tobe insignificant. When proposed, they seemed to make perfect sense, and


TABLE 8

Test Results Indicating Which HypothesesWere Supported or Unsupported

Hypothesis Hypothesis Supported

1. National income Strong2. Central government expenditures3. Integration with world economy Weak4. Science, research, and education5. Computers and Internet hosts Weak6. Cultural values7. Democracy8. Legal system

TABLE 7

Respecified Correlation Matrix and Multivariate Regressions forall Hypothesized Variables for the Nonmember Countries of the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development


Regression 3.88911 1 3.8891 22.0***Residual 9.92083 56 0.177158


Constant –1.56252 0.3993 –3.91LGDPCAP97 0.562496 0.1201 4.69***

*p > .05. **p > .01. ***p > .005. Adjusted R2 = 26.9%.



we also know from other studies that country (family) distinctions interms of political culture or regulatory style are sometimes quite helpful tounderstand cross-national administrative differences (Castles, 1993; deJong, 1999; Dyson, 1980; Vogel, 1986).

But in an era in which globalization and international harmonization ofregulatory regimes are gradually undermining national institutional dis-tinctions, especially in policy domains under strong international influ-ence (Cerny, forthcoming), the predictive power of families of nationsbecomes of less important. Public officials in all countries are increas-ingly inclined to borrow policy solutions from wherever they think fit andwith whoever they happen to be in touch. Some of the Webmasters weinterviewed mentioned that they studied foreign Web sites for inspirationand often incorporated elements of what they found. They sought techni-cally good options rather than solutions that made sense institutionally orlegally.

This phenomenon may seem theoretically unsatisfactory for those spe-cialized in cross-national comparison of political and administrative sys-tems. However, it is potentially of major importance when new types andformats of communication and decision making between the public sectorand citizens develop outside the traditional legal-administrative channels,especially when they have not been modeled after them. It is something mostlegal theorists and student of politics and government currently overlook.

Second, the functioning of governmental and administrative systems ishighly complex. Up until now, students of public administration have onlybeen able to address this complexity with qualitative research methodolo-gies. It is clearly more satisfactory to explain France’s progress by sayingthat public presence on the Internet was helped enormously by a specifi-cally French predecessor, the Minitel system and that the French govern-ment has fought hard to combat Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the field oftelecommunications. Sweden’s comparatively low openness score ascompared to many other prosperous countries can be understood as aresult of the fact that there, government ministries are small and mainlywork on government plans, while leaving questions of implementationand accessibility to citizens to much bigger agencies.

If the strongest explanation—national income per capita—does notparsimoniously explain the rapidity, breadth, and ambitiousness of thespread of openness via the Web, another explanation is possible as well.Much of the variance may be due to a nascent process of emergent institu-tional isomorphism in which Web-based openness is becoming an attrib-ute that is taken for granted.




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Structuration is a well-established concept in population ecology andorganizational sociology and provides a way to “move to this middleground between studying structures and studying human agency” to getaround the bias toward determinism of the former and the wide variabilityof the latter (Cloke, Philo, & Sadler, 1991, pp. 93-131; Giddens, 1984).Weber noted the tendency of organizations to compete with others in thesame business, weeding out the weaker systems, so that over time only themost robust organizations survive (Runciman, 1978). Through competi-tion, survivors would become more similar as they iterated onto the samebasic set of attributes that ensured longevity. Until the next dislocation inthe environment, then, that group of organizations, now called a field,would be relatively homogeneous and successful. Weber called this inevi-table cycle of competition narrowing structural options overall homogeni-zation, or an “iron cage” of efficiency (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;Runciman, 1978).

In 1983, DiMaggio and Powell argued in their “Iron Cage Revisited”article that the character of rationalization had altered in the interveningyears, and the modern version of structuration did not necessarily emergethrough competition or result in more efficient organizations. Publicagencies, for example, do not directly compete with each other in provid-ing the same services. In more public domains, although structuration is“the process of institutional definition” by which “once disparate organi-zations in the same line of business are structured into an actual field . . .powerful forces emerge that lead them to become more similar to oneanother,” and the most efficient organizational forms would not necessar-ily eliminate the less efficient systems (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, pp.147-149).

Rather, growing homogeneity among modern organizations emergesas a function of unprecedented amounts of newly available informationabout other organizations in the environment. Four conditions fosteringthe development of a field could emerge without the elimination of ineffi-cient, nonrobust attributes. These four indicators of the process of homog-enization or isomorphism, as set forth by DiMaggio and Powell (1983),are

an increase in the extent of interaction among organizations in the field; theemergence of sharply defined interorganizational structures of dominationand patterns of coalition; an increase in the information load with whichorganizations in a field must contend; and the development of a mutualawareness among participants in a set of organizations that they areinvolved in a common enterprise. (p. 149)




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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255482957_The_Iron_Cage_Revisted_Institutional_Isomorphism_and_Collective_Rationality_in_Organizational_Fields?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==



The number and vigor of other public or relevant private Web sites, forexample, could contribute to this sense of a common enterprise thatrequires a common response.

Bolstered by incentives other than competition, such as coercion, mim-icry, or consensus, this newer form of structuration is distinguishable fromcompetitive isomorphism as “institutional isomorphism” (DiMaggio &Powell, 1983) and could provide an additional explanation of this spread-ing Web-based phenomenon. For public organizations in general, the sig-nificance of this modern process of structuration is the dissociation ofcompetitive or other performance experiences from the structures thatemerge and become dominant in a field. For reasons not necessarily con-nected to efficiency or individual organizational goals, a set of structuralforms can become the minimally legitimate set of options in front of thefield’s organizational members.

Strang and Meyer (1993) also argued that this process can emerge sim-ply as key terms for actors and actions are redefined to include an assump-tion of Web-based openness. In CyPRG interviews, Webmasters werealready redefining the limits of what was termed “public” informationexpansively and commensurately fighting for this redefinition in internalorganizational arenas (La Porte, 1998). When applied to public institu-tions, terms such as public or effective become redefined globally toinclude Web communications with citizens, then certain similarities inWeb usage will follow, at least for the near term.

Future research is needed to look into the extent to which these basiccomponents and associated domestic incentives such a governmentalmandates are present to establish whether openness has emerged in a newprocess of structuration across nations, sectors, and public agencies. Inci-dental explanations will never result in a statistically sound model, andmore in-depth analysis of institutional structures in countries and the moreconcrete processes of government Web site evolution might help to get astronger grasp of determining factors leading to openness. For example,not only wealth and structuration, but also the political background behindthe differences within the Anglo-Saxon group with the United States andthe United Kingdom on one hand, and Canada, Australia, and New Zea-land on the other, may well turn out to be very meaningful. In the first twocountries, a new term has become attached to government philosophy ofcitizen empowerment, especially in Britain since the Blair government.

Conversely, in the other countries, new public management is still thedominant administrative focus at the end of the 20th century. New public






management theorists focus on efficiency in product delivery and outputwithout paying attention to the specific position of the public sector. Theyfeel the public sector should involve itself as little as possible with citizensso as not to impinge on their liberties (Peters & Pierre, 1998). The Clintonand Blair administrations, placing high hopes in empowerment by expand-ing public sector accessibility, tried to win back trust among citizens in thegovernment through means of Internet communication. According toThomas (1998), trust can be achieved or restored by repeated successfulindividual interaction, which is what open Web sites aim to achieve. Inaddition, the emerging process of postmodernization (Inglehart, 1997)leads people to desire more individual self-expression aimed at specificissues of their choosing. Open government Web sites are probably a mainroute for the political aspect of this self-expression in the future.

Here, we find two contrasting visions of the public sector within onefamily of nations:

1. One is aimed at increasing product efficiency without fostering any illu-sions about the inherent interest of the customer of public goods in politi-cal issues. This approach is strongly reminiscent of “protective democ-racy” as described by Held (1996). In his view, democratic regimesminimize their hold on society and only provide a minimum of efficientpublic services. The “night watchman state” would be another appropriatedenomination.

2. The other is aimed at increasing civic participation by inviting the publicto submit their wishes and complaints directly to public institutions andagencies. This approach more closely resembles Held’s “developmentaldemocracy” conception (Held, 1996). In it, democratic regimes invite citi-zens to take their fate in their own hands and develop their capacities to runtheir state. To realize freedom, the state should not play the negative roleof sheltering people from government but should pursue the positive roleof making all citizens small governors.

Both visions can support an increasingly Web-supported common def-inition of basic governance, the first to make institutional delivery of ser-vices more efficient and the second to improve the ease of informed citi-zen input. Hence, use of the Web is likely to rise irrespective of thephilosophical choices and is likely to be included in commonly accepteddefinitions of democracy. Beyond that compatibility, however, opennessvia the Web is less assured. Implementation choices made along the linesof this last distinction will determine the future of openness as a uniqueindicator of the vigor of a democracy.




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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31187190_Governance_Without_Government_Rethinking_Public_Administration?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-d1608bee35594844d54a62934c5b69bb-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0MDY4OTg0OTtBUzoyNDM3Nzc1MzMxMTY0MTdAMTQzNTEzMjUwMTUyNQ==


APPENDIX AWeb Site Attribute Evaluation System (WAES)

TRANSPARENCY

Ownership

T1a: Agency involvement with site (average of Webmaster and tailoring,both 0 or 1).

T1b: Provides different Webmaster from main government page.T1c: Provides obvious tailoring indicating agency itself has ownership of site

content.

Contact information

T2a: Provides central agency non–e-mail addresses.T2b: Provides e-mail address to Webmaster.T2c: Provides e-mail address to someone inside agency in addition to

Webmaster.T2d: Provides some kind of addresses for employees within agency beyond top

guys (e.g., shows a phonebook with position).T2e: Provides addresses for subelements within agency (can you write them a

snail-mail letter with this address?).T2f: Provides e-mail address to someone responsible for both content of the

site and technical support for the site.T2g: Provides e-mail address only to someone responsible for technical sup-

port for the site.T2h: Provides e-mail address only to someone responsible for content of the

site.T2i: Does the person responsible for technical support for the site appear to be a

commercial firm?

Organizational or operational information

T3a: Provides details on senior officials’ experiences or vision of future fororganization.

T3b: Provides mission statement and various activities of agency.T3c: Provides other issue-related government addresses.T3d: Provides non–issue-related, other agency addresses.T3e: Provides issue-related other nongovernmental information source.T3f: Provides organizational structure in graphic form (add 0.1 for every level

above or below shown in graphic).T3g: Provides reports, research, laws, and regulations in easily readable format

on screen.




Citizen consequences

T4a: Provides text of regulations/laws/agency research or in-depth explana-tions of requirements imposed on citizens resulting from agency activities.

T4b: Provides instructions on how to complete these actions.T4c: Provides form in graphics for screen capture or copy.T4d: Provides appeal process for decisions or address of an ombudsman.

Freshness

T5a: Latest published “last updated” date (yyyymmmdd) on main page or, ifnone, a key subordinate page, or 0 if no date listed on any of these pages.

T5b: Latest last updated date of page noted in T5a by going into View, DocInfo, and noting last update date (yyyymmmdd): If no published date, useslatest from either main page or a key subordinate page.

INTERACTIVITY

Ownership

I1a: Provides clickable e-mail link to Webmaster.I1b: Provides clickable e-mail link to senior agency official.I1c: Provides dialog box or online form for communication to the Webmaster

within the agency.

Reachability

I2a: Provides clickable e-mail link to someone inside agency in addition toWebmaster.

I2b: Provides clickable e-mail link to a number of agency employees.I2c: Provides an online issue-related forum for outsider participation such as

chat lines and listserves.

Organizational or operational information

I3a: Provides clickable easy download of mission statement and various activi-ties of agency.

I3b: Provides clickable hotlink to other issue-related government addresses.I3c: Provides clickable hotlink to non–issue-related, other agency addresses.I3d: Provides clickable hotlink to issue-related other nongovernmental infor-

mation sources.I3e: Provides an agency newsletter that can be obtained automatically online

via a subscription (more than a pamphlet offering a list of reports—this hascontent itself).

I3f: Provides a searchable index for archived newsletters, laws, regulations,and requirements.




Responses

I4a: Provides clickable hotlink to listed subelements within agency (add 0.1 forevery subelement hotlinked).

I4b: Provides clickable hotlink to sublevels noted in agency’s organizationalstructure graphic (add 0.1 for every level above or below hotlinked).

I4c: Provides clickable hotlink to download text of regulations/laws/agencyresearch or in-depth explanations of requirements imposed on citizensresulting from agency activities.

I4d: Provides any required submission forms onscreen for clickable download(add 0.1 for every form accessible for download).

I4e: Provides online form completion and submission (add 0.1 for every formaccessible for online completion and submission). This includes orderingpublications online.

I4f: Provides an automatic response limit for response to online submissions.I4g: Providesclickable link toappealprocess fordecisionsand/oran ombudsman.I4h: Provides other language access to site for visitors unable to speak or read

the language of the host country.I4i: Provides iconographic access to site for visitors unable to speak or read the

language of the host country.I4j: Provides audio access to site for visitors unable to see the site.

NOTE: Each item is scored with a 0 or 1 unless otherwise specified.




441

APPENDIX BData Sources

Variable Name Variable Description Source

POP97 Population 1997, 1000s World Bank, World Development Indicators, 1999, summary table. Data availableat http://www.worldbank.org

OPEN+98 Openness, 1998: Cyberspace Policy Research Group, www.cyprg.arizona.eduTransparency + Interactivity *Percentage of ministries with Web sites

INDIVID Individualism Hofstede, Geert, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (London:MASCUL Masculinity McGraw-Hill, 1991), Table 3.1, p. 53, and Table 4.1, p. 84. Additional

estimates by de Jong and La Porte

POSTMAT Postmaterialist values Inglehart, Ronald, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, EconomicTRUST Interpersonal trust and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1997), p. 359DEMOC Democracy Polity III: Regime Type and Political Authority, 1800-1994, Keith Jaggers,

Ted Robert Gurr, principal investigators, 2nd ICPSR version, ICPSR 6695,Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, September 1996

POLCIV Political rights + civil liberties Freedom in the World, 1999 (New York: Freedom House, 1999)VOTING Voting turnout, vote per voting age International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Voter Turnout

population, percentage from 1945 to 1998: A Global Report on Political Participation. Data available atwww.idea.int/Voter_turnout/index.html

CORP Corporatism score Crepaz, Markus, M., “Corporatism in Decline? An Empirical Analysis of theImpact of Corporatism on Macroeconomic Performance and Industrial Disputesin 18 Industrialized Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 25, no. 2,July 1992, pp. 139-168

(continued)

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442 APPENDIX B (continued)

Variable Name Variable Description Source

COMMON British Common Derived from Kime’s International Law Directory, supplemented by CIA Factbook,CIVILCivil online version. Data available at www.smlawpub.co.uk/kimes and www.cia.gov/OTHERLET Other cia/publications/factbook/country.htmlROMAN Combined RomanSCAN ScandinavianISLAMIC IslamicSOCIALIST SocialistFRMSOCST Former socialistGDPCAP97 GDP per capita, 1997 Derived from World Bank, World Development Indicators, 1999, Table 4.2LGDPCAP97CGEGDP Central government expenditures, World Bank, Development Indicators, 1999, Table 14.3, Central GovernmentLCGE96 percentage of GDP, 1996 ExpendituresTRADE Trade in goods, percentage of World Bank, World Development Indictors, 1999, Table 4.2LTRADE PPP GDP, 1997PRIVK Gross private capital flows, percent World Bank, World Development Indictors, 1999, table 6.1LPRIVK of PPP GDP, 1997FDINVEST Gross foreign direct investment, percentLFDINV of PPP GDP, 1997COMEXP Communications, exports, including World Bank, Human Development Indicators, 1998, Table 4.6, Structure of ServiceLCOMEXP computer, information and other services, Exports

percent of total, 1996FINEXP Insurance and financial services, exports,LFINEXP percent of total, 1996

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SCIENG Scientists and engineers in research and World Bank, Human Development Indicators, CD-ROM, 1999, Table 5.12LSCIENG development per 1,000,000 people,

1985-1995RDEXP Expenditures for research and development, World Bank, Human Development Indicators, CD-ROM, 1999, Table 5.12LRDEXP percentage of GNP, 1985-1995EDUC Public expenditure on education as percent UNESCO, UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, 1998. Data available atLEDUC of GNP, 1996, male and female www.unescostat.unesco.org/yearbook/Indicator_II.html.orgCOMPUTER Personal computers per 1,000 people, 1997 World Bank, Human Development Indicators, CD-ROM, 1999, Table 5.11, basedLCOMPUTE on ITU and Network Wizards dataNETHOST Internet hosts per 10,000 people, July, 1998 World Bank, Human Development Indicators, CD-ROM, 1999, Table 5.11, basedLNETHOST on ITU and Network Wizards data

443

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NOTE

1. As of this writing, the data for 1999 were still being processed and cleaned. A subse-quent version of this article will contain a summary of this data. All data may be found at theCyPRG Web site, www.cyprg.arizona.edu.

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