What is it about?
Asking such a simple question as what e-government politics really is to policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders and all the more so in a cross-country and cross-institutional manner could be an extremely prolific undertaking since it allows to generate a myriad of unique stories and perspectives about this phenomenon. E-government is a universally well-known concept in public policy, public administration, political and economic sciences and beyond and related academic and professional literature is really rich with demonstrative cases that represent these narratives well from various viewpoints and fields. In this regard, the key purpose of the article is not to update a state-of-the-art in the sphere but rather an attempt to synthesize and systematize all available institutional perspectives on the development of this truly multidimensional networking phenomenon equally from stakeholder, cross-institutional and cross-country perspectives.
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Why is it important?
E-government as a phenomenon is widely regarded as an under-theorized discipline, which, however, does not exclude a possibility of extracting a more grand theory from the available pools of knowledge. A more general schematic bird’s eye outlook to the political and networking domains of the related decision-making processes in the sphere is needed to advance the concept further in research and practice. In this respect, the article reviews and systematizes all available stakeholder and institutional perspectives on the development of e-government politics as a political phenomenon, analyzing, in a consecutive and consistent manner, the following perspectives: 1) the perspectives of individual stakeholders, namely, e-government policymakers and practitioners, citizens, businesses, developers, non-governmental organizations and media communities in order to identify the key public values, mechanisms of realization and strategic policies that they envision or prefer to see in the sphere; 2) the perspectives of e-government peers, namely government-to-government, citizen-to-citizen and business-to-business peers in an effort to shed light on the invisible mechanism of e-government reforms at different institutional levels; 3) the perspectives of e-government ecosystems, namely, digital federalism and centralism in a tentative attempt to understand how various nations adopt these ecosystems to their local political and administrative conditions. All these three multilevel perspectives in this research are defined by the author of the paper as key aspects of e-government politics in, respectively, stakeholder, institutional and cross-country contexts
Perspectives
There are three research questions that will shape the whole analysis in the paper, namely: What are the key public values, mechanisms of realization and strategic policies that different stakeholders envision or presumably prefer to see in the e-government sphere? How e-government philosophy is changing with the advent of various peer-to-peer platforms that are gaining an ever-growing popularity in the sphere among both public and private stakeholders? How the perception and realization mechanisms of e-government as an administrative and, most importantly, political concept is changing from country to country with the adoption of different institutional ecosystems?
Dr Maxat Kassen
Astana IT University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: E-Government Politics as a Networking Phenomenon, International Journal of Electronic Government Research, April 2017, IGI Global,
DOI: 10.4018/ijegr.2017040102.
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