Diffusion of personalized e-government services among Dutch municipalities

In this article, we investigate how and why various municipalities in the Netherlands adopt personalized electronic services. More specifically, we analyze the channels of communication and persuasion that are being used in the diffusion process. In order to do this, we analyze a time series of personalization prevalence in more than four hundred municipalities in the years 2006 through 2010 with a quantitative ‘rate of diffusion’-model and conclude that diffusion of personalized e-government in the time frame 2006–2010 in the Netherlands can be explained both by municipalities mimicking each other (through horizontal channels of communication) as well as through initiatives from national authorities by means of benchmarking, legislation, and so forth (through vertical channels of persuasion). On the basis of these conclusions, new research directions in the field of e-government are indicated and discussed.