Government Information Quarterly最新文献

Following the idea that citizens' regulatory preferences matter for the acceptance and success of policy measures, this paper investigates citizens' support for the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The focus lies on the transparency and the ecological sustainability of AI as two key challenges tied to possible long-term impacts on societies. Findings from survey data representative of the German population show overall moderate to strong support for the government regulating AI. Perceived regulatory competence of policymakers is positively associated with citizens' support for soft regulation. Lower trust in tech companies is linked to a lower readiness to rely on soft regulation, but not to more demand for hard regulation. While regulatory preferences barely map on political conflict lines, people's future orientation emerges as a strong correlate of support for both hard and soft regulation. Citizens thus seem to perceive a clear sustainability dimension in the development and governance of AI.

Responding to growing criticism that the use of artificial intelligence in public services reinforces unethical activities such as discrimination, the paper presents two new cases from the cities in Finland, both self-describing as centres for the ethical use of AI. Structured by an ethical AI foresighting framework we explore how and why AI is being used in local public services and its outcomes, the degree to which current AI-enabled public services are ethically evaluated and whether ethical evaluation features in trends for future AI use.

The research objectives are to demonstrate how AI is being deployed in cities claiming to be European centres for ethical AI use, to innovate new service models and to present a new framework, based on social learning to help analysis of ethics in AI-related innovation processes, in particular those enhancing accountability to citizens. In doing so, we show in practical terms how ethical decision-making processes are identified and responded to addressing explainability and understandability issues.

We suggest that negative ethical results from AI use can be avoided, however this requires an ethos of citizen involvement in innovation processes and significant investment in times and attention to distribute learning and opinions between providers, technical partners and service users include an acknowledgment that technical partners learn from users as well as users learning from technical partners.

Many welfare state services have rapidly become ‘digital by default’. Electronic identification (e-ID) technology is needed for secure identification authentication with regard to digital services. This study uses socio-technical systems theory to analyse the development and transfer of e-ID technology in the context of public-private partnerships (PPPs). Recent studies have shown that the ‘digital divide’ is prominent between ethnic minorities and the majority populations. Yet there is a scarcity of studies investigating inequalities related to obtaining an e-ID, which is required to access digital public services. Our empirical results show that transnational migrants had lower access to e-ID, which may hinder their ability to access public services. We used representative Finnish population-based survey data (FinMonik study) to analyse general socio-demographic and migration-specific factors associated with not having an e-ID. Our results showed that approximately 91% of the respondents had an e-ID. This is lower than the 98% among the general working-age population. There are significant differences in having an e-ID between different migrant groups. The lowest rate (84%) was observed for migrants who had moved to Finland from outside the EU and OECD countries. Regression analysis showed that lower socio-economic status and weak local language skills were associated with not having an e-ID. We argue that e-ID as a socio-technical system includes unintended contradictions stemming from PPP when the non-discrimination principle of the welfare state clashes with the private sector's operational logics and interests. We argue that the government should remain accountable for ensuring the safety, efficacy, quality, and adequate access to welfare state services developed in PPP.

Digital technologies are increasingly used in global climate negotiations to enhance interaction and participation. However, global climate negotiations are characterized by paradoxes and tensions that complicate the resolution of the problem. Thus, the use of digital technologies can only be effective if orchestrated with an understanding of underlying global climate negotiations paradoxes. The objective of this paper is to identify research needs related to the intersection of global climate negotiations, paradoxes, and the use of digital technologies. We propose a research agenda based on paradoxes of global climate negotiations at different levels of online interaction. Two streams of research inform our research agenda: paradox theory and research on online communities. We illustrate our reasoning by discussing digital support for the United Nation's Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings for climate negotiations. The research agenda contributes to the digital governance field by sensitizing the community of the underlying paradoxes in global governance. The combination of online communities research and paradox theory offer novel guidance on complexity and potential challenges when applying digital technologies in global climate negotiations. Our research agenda can be used to develop appropriate response strategies as it highlights challenges in need of attention.

In the context of the digital economy, the potential values of open government data (OGD) need to be fully unlocked. It is necessary to investigate the key factors influencing citizens' intention to use OGD websites. Based on trust theory and social cognitive theory, we incorporated privacy concern into the theoretical model and integrated the perspective of relationship marketing to construct a comprehensive framework. Drawing on survey data from 225 respondents in China, we used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to test data. The SEM results indicate that trust, affect, and privacy concern are significant for usage intention toward OGD websites. Those factors are predicted by economic, social, and structural bonds as well as outcome expectation and self-efficiency, respectively. FsQCA explored the configuration solutions leading to high behavioral intention (hBI) and non-behavioral intention (∼BI) to use OGD websites, providing theoretical and practical implications for policymakers and practitioners regarding how to enhance the usage of OGD websites.

Ever-growing concerns over ‘Big Brother’ continue driving individuals towards user-centric identity management systems. Nascent innovations are framed as offering Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Because of the association with value-laden ideals and technical components like blockchain, SSI is caught up with both hype and idiosyncrasy. Competing interpretations of SSI damage the public discourse and risk misrepresenting affordances these systems might offer. Based on a qualitative inductive interview study and document analysis, this article extrapolates a constructivist theoretical frame – the Extended Model of Interpretive Flexibility – which combines insights from the Social Construction of Technology and the Structurational Model of Technology. The Extended Model of Interpretive Flexibility highlights malleability in the technical implementations and social representations, which in turn is affected by and influences institutional properties around SSI. This research further offers implications for practice around the implementation of SSI, in particular regarding policy, management, and design. For theory on public sector information systems, the proposed model has generalizable potential for the analysis of socio-technical systems and offers future research directions.

In just a few years, the issue of “digital sovereignty” has emerged as an important security issue for governments across the globe, reflecting a growing unease about the security risks associated with government services that depend on foreign service providers for digital infrastructure and traffic routing. This work investigates to which extent government services and communication with citizens relies on infrastructure outside their own jurisdiction for six countries facing sensitive or sometimes even antagonistic relations with neighbors: India, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. By combining various methods (traceroute measurements, passive DNS data and geolocation), we determine where and how domains are hosted, as well as the network paths taken by citizens' traffic to them. We uncover different strategies and degrees of autonomy, as well as difficult tradeoffs between different risks to autonomy, some of which might be larger than the risks associated with the dependency on foreign providers. This includes transnational providers being used by all countries, with geopolitical rivals even being tenants on the same network and traffic between citizens and governments regularly traversing international borders. Furthermore, we compared our empirical findings to stated governmental policies and find that they are not always consistent.

There is a growing literature on how policy capacities shape policy implementation. In this article we focus on a specific type: information capacity and its effects on implementation and policy outcomes. Through a comparative case study of the COVID-19 vaccination programs in the United States, Mexico, and the Netherlands, we study how a government's information capacity – the capacity to collect and process information regarding citizens, businesses, and territory – structures administrative burdens for citizens. We develop a typology of models of information capacity (infrastructural, system-by-system, and ad hoc) and explain how they influence policy implementation. We show how the infrastructural model is best equipped to absorb administrative burdens for a majority of citizens, while the system-by-system model and especially the ad hoc model tend to push costs towards frontline workers and citizens. Yet, even if information capacities may shape the affordances of policy implementation beyond the direct control of politicians and policymakers, governments still can make the deliberate choice to mitigate their negative effects by organizing operational flexibility and discretion.

A growing body of research has explored the emergence of new digital forms of public accountability. Studies in this area show how digital technologies are equipped to support more participative information-sharing and provide dialogic tools for interactions with forums. However, no research has yet examined how to engage forums and enable web-based accountability relationships. We address this gap by highlighting the need to adapt social media communication strategies for topic-specific discussions. Our analysis builds on a database containing 25,485 posts extracted from social media platforms used by 13 Polish municipalities and focuses on two different matters of discussion: posts related to public health during the COVID-19 pandemic and non-COVID-19 related posts. Moreover, during the analysis, we consider two social media communication strategies: passive and participatory. Our findings indicate that both communication strategies can generate forum engagement, which subsequently supports web-based accountability. They also demonstrate that, to support forum engagement, municipalities should avoid one-style-fits-all approaches to communication and instead tailor strategies to the specific subject of discussion. This study contributes to expanding academic debates on web-based accountability by illustrating how the use of social media communication strategies can help engage citizens in public forums to enhance accountability relationships.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in public administration are gaining increasing attention due to the potential benefits they can provide in improving governmental operations. However, translating technological opportunities into concrete public value for public administrations is still limited. One of the factors hindering this progress is the lack of AI capability within public organisations. The research found that various components of AI capability are essential for successfully developing and using AI technologies, including tangible, intangible, and human-related factors. There is a distinction between the AI capability to develop and the AI capability to implement AI technologies, with more administrations capable of the former but finding difficulties in the latter. A lack of in-house technical expertise to maintain and update the AI systems, legal challenges in deploying developed AI systems, and the capability to introduce changes in the organisation to ensure the system remains operational and used by relevant end-users are among the most critical limiting factors for long-term use of AI by public administrations. The research underlines the strong complementarity between historical eGovernment developments and the capability to deploy AI technologies. The study suggests that funding alone may not be enough to acquire AI capability, and public administrations need to focus on both the capability to develop and implement AI technologies. The research emphasizes that human skillsets, both technical and non-technical, are essential for the successful implementation of AI in public administration.