Government Information Quarterly最新文献

Open government data (OGD) platform ecosystems hold immense potential for promoting transparency, civic engagement, economic growth, and improved governmental offerings. The prevailing strategy to building OGD platform ecosystems follows a sequential approach where the OGD platform is built first and the ecosystem is built second, resulting in low engagement. In this paper, we derive insights into an alternative approach to developing OGD platform ecosystems from TourismData, a state-owned tourism initiative in Germany. We report on the phases between 2018 and 2022 and derive four dynamic and incremental phases from which we derive three learnings: context specificity, continuous adaptation, and organic expansion. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for developing high-engagement OGD platform ecosystems that include and engage ecosystem actors from the start and, hence, take advantage of the generative potential of OGD. This approach illustrates the importance of developing OGD platform ecosystems with high contextual relevance to ensure that data can be used to enable meaningful interactions between ecosystem actors and promote continuous adaptation and expansion.

Research has shown that the centralization of financial power in unitary states is not conducive to local governments' promotion of e-government, resulting in the expansion of local fiscal deficits. The fundamental reason for this problem lies in the contradiction between the information disclosure required for effective e-government and the information concentration characteristic of unitary countries. To identify the impact of e-government on fiscal deficits in this context, we take two e-government pilot projects in China as quasi-natural experiments and conduct difference-in-differences analysis of county-level data from 1997 to 2018. Through a common trend test, a placebo test, a lagged outcome variable design and the difference-in-differences with propensity score matching method, we validate our finding that e-government can effectively reduce the fiscal deficit of local governments. This function is mainly realized through the application of media tools and expansion of the scale of local enterprises. However, the impact of e-government on fiscal deficit differs significantly between regions with different levels of economic development. The effect is more obvious in regions with a poorer economic foundation. Our findings indicate the importance of e-government construction in unitary developing countries.

Fake news, propagated on social media platforms, is regularly used as a tool to influence political beliefs. In this paper, we investigate the impact of fake news on perceptions of election processes by drawing on the theory of motivated reasoning. We use survey data on partisan alignment, news consumption habits, and voting methods collected before and after the 2020 United States general election. Our pre-election results indicated that political alignment and the type of news a voter consumes influences their trust perceptions of election processes. These findings were replicated in the post-election results. We also found that Facebook users were more likely to consume fake and hyper-partisan news, whereas people who directly navigate to news websites consume primarily mainstream news sources. Implications for research and policy are discussed along with opportunities for future research on the impacts of fake news.

The prevalence of disability across the globe is substantial and is predicted to increase as the population ages. As of 2022, almost one in six citizens in Australia has a disability, with most relying on e-government services to support aspects of their daily living. To cope with the growing service demands, the government is using e-government services as a “default” means to deliver government policy outcomes that create public value for citizens living with disability. It is therefore critical that e-government succeed, as failure to provide adequate services to citizens living with disability can lead to measurable economic and social consequences. This study aims to identify the factors that influence e-government success from the perspective of citizens living with disability, using a public value approach. The study examines twenty cases representing citizens living with disability in Australia, analysed through the ‘lived’ experience of these citizens using e-government.

Digitalization has expanded the scope of citizen participation. Nevertheless, there are no conclusive findings on online citizen participation and inclusive policymaking. This study adds in line with the discussion with a fresh perspective of institutional bias. It presents new evidence by examining the process, participants, policy agenda, and sentiments of public opinions from the government-led and Internet-empowered citizen participation regarding the 2017–2035 Shanghai Master Plan. Four findings are reported based on the in-depth case study with text and sentiment analysis. First, the government-led model provides institutionalized opportunities for citizen engagement throughout the policy process, while the Internet-empowered citizen participation is characterized by contingency and ad hoc. Second, the government-led model remains elite-dominated, while the Internet empowers a wider scope of stakeholders with an open and popularized participation platform. Third, the public opinion from the Internet-empowered model often goes beyond or even against the pre-defined official principles and goals. In contrast, the civic discussion in the government-led model influences policy by changing the sequence of policy agenda or providing focus within the official setting. Fourth, citizens, especially the experts, are more likely to give positive feedback in the government-led model than the Internet-empowered approach. These findings confirm and identify the remaining institutional bias that hinders inclusive policymaking in the Internet age. Theoretically, it reminds scholars to examine the institutional arrangements regarding citizen participation carefully. Practically, it indicates that the central government could facilitate inclusive policymaking at the local level by reducing the institutional bias of the government-led approach and utilizing text and sentiment analysis to urge the local government's response to Internet-empowered public opinion.

Public organizations are looking for new ways to use digital technologies to increase the efficiency of their internal processes and improve their interactions with clients, whether citizens or businesses. In response, scholars suggest that public organizations be proactive in digital public services such that the organizations approach their clients, rather than the other way around. In the most extreme form of proactivity, clients do not have to do anything to receive a public service. Although various examples of proactive public services are in use, how proactivity changes the conceptual understanding of digital public services remains unclear. Therefore, we derive the changes that proactivity causes in a conceptualization of digital public service by means of a conceptual analysis through the lens of a seminal theoretical work on proactivity. The results indicate that proactivity can ensure equal accessibility to a subset of public services, rely on more comprehensive integration of IT systems on the back end, and change how value is co-created in the service process. We formulate the changes as propositions that future work can investigate empirically and discuss proactive digital public services as a way to reduce clients' administrative burden. We contribute to theory by clarifying the conceptual changes in digital public services that proactivity invokes and call for joint research by scholars of public administration, information systems, and service management to relate the research streams of administrative burden and proactive digital public service.

Social media is widely used for work by civil servants in China at present. In Chinese cultural context, social media use for work during non-work hours (SMUNW) has many different effects on civil servants from those in Western countries. However, we have little understanding about how social media use for work during non-work hours could affect the psychological state of civil servants at work. Drawing upon conservation of resources theory and work-family border theory, this study utilized a moderated mediation model to investigate the relationship between SMUNW and employee work engagement. Based on data collected from 423 Chinese civil servants, the results demonstrated that SMUNW was negatively associated with work engagement. The work-family conflict played a mediating role between SMUNW and work engagement and public service motivation (PSM) moderated the negative effect between work-family conflict and work engagement. More importantly, our findings showed that the indirect relationship between SMUNW and work engagement through work-family conflict was more pronounced for civil servants with higher PSM rather than lower. Finally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

E-governments have become a popular topic in recent decades and have attracted widespread attention on a global scale. Previous research mainly investigating the direct impact of IT infrastructure on e-government performance lacks in the context of other organizational resources and contingency factors. This study uses a panel data from Chinese prefectural cities and further exams the effect of interaction between IT infrastructure and other organizational resources (financial and human resources) on e-government performance through the moderating role of environmental uncertainty (environmental turbulence and complexity) based on resource-based and contingency views. Interaction between IT infrastructure and financial resources has a positive effect on e-government, while the interaction between IT infrastructure and human resources has a negative effect on e-government performance. Additionally, the effect of the interaction between IT infrastructure and organizational resources (financial and human resources) on e-government performance increases with a decrease in environmental turbulence and with an increase in environmental complexity. This article helps practitioners recognize the importance of IT infrastructure in developing e-government performance and provide actionable insights on financial and human resource allocation, while considering IT infrastructure. The paper offers evidences for government managers seeking resource combination to address turbulent and complex environments.

Despite the exponential growth in the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), our knowledge on the public perception of AI, especially in the context of local government services, is still limited. To bridge this gap, this study aims to provide empirical evidence and insights into public perceptions concerning the use of AI in local government services. Our methodological approach involves collecting data via an online survey from the residents of three major Australian cities—i.e., Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane—and Hong Kong (n = 850), and performing statistical analyses. We found that: (a) Ease of using AI is significantly and positively influenced by attitude towards AI; (b) Attitude towards AI significantly and positively influences perceived usefulness of AI in local government services; (c) AI is seen useful in resource management and to improve delivery of service, reduction of cost to provide urban-service, improvement of public safety, and monitoring the effectiveness of strategies to manage environmental crisis, and; (d) AI is more positively perceived by Australians in comparison to Hong Kongers, indicating the impact of contextual and cultural differences. The research findings inform local government authorities—e.g., urban policymakers, managers, and planners—on their AI policy, planning and implementation decisions.

Government chatbots have become increasingly popular as artificial-intelligence-based tools to improve communication between the government and its citizens. This study explores the interaction mode design of a trustworthy government chatbot, which involves multiple social characteristics from the user-centric perspective. A discrete choice experiment was conducted in the context of Chinese government chatbots to examine the effects of various social characteristics on citizen preferences. Participants utilized a crowdsourcing survey platform to report their preferences for interaction processes designed with distinct sets of social characteristics. Valid data were obtained from 371 participants and analyzed using a multinomial logit model. The results indicate that (in order from highest to lowest impact) emotional intelligence, proactivity, identity consistency, and conscientiousness significantly influence the citizens' preferences. Identity consistency has a negative effect, whereas the other factors all have positive impacts. It was also determined that some of these correlations are influenced by the participants' individual characteristics, such as age, gender, and prior experience with chatbots. This work provides empirical evidence for the relative importance of social characteristics and their impacts on user perception, expands the service dimension scope of information provision/communication (one of five categories of digital interaction), and facilitates the identification and operationalization of the social characteristics. We provide a theoretical framework to understand the interaction model design of a trustworthy government chatbot and also offer practical recommendations for government chatbot designers and policy implications.