E-Government as an Instrument of Fiscal Accountability and Responsiveness

Fiscal transparency and citizen participation in budgeting processes are widely promoted as means toward the ends of democratic accountability and responsiveness in the allocation and use of public funds. In the past decade, academics and practitioners enthusiastic about e-government have emphasized the potential for using information technology to enhance democratic governance. Putting these two streams of public administration theory and practice together, the authors developed criteria for assessing e-budgeting efforts and applied them to a sample of Web sites operated by state and local governments. Although practitioners are ahead of academics in exploring the potential of e-government for improving fiscal accountability and responsiveness, practice lags behind the relevant basic recommendations of the Government Finance Officers Association. This finding leads to research and practice agendas aimed at enhancing the use of e-government to enhance fiscal transparency and participation.

[1]  A. Franklin,et al.  Searching for a Role for Citizens in the Budget Process , 2004 .

[2]  J. Evans,et al.  Signaling and Monitoring in Public-Sector Accounting , 1987 .

[3]  James Melitski,et al.  Digital Government Worldwide: A e-Government Assessment of Municipal Web Sites , 2005, Int. J. Electron. Gov. Res..

[4]  Robert N. Stern,et al.  The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective. , 1979 .

[5]  Donald F. Kettl,et al.  Inside the reinvention machine : appraising governmental reform , 1995 .

[6]  D. West.  E‐Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes , 2004 .

[7]  D. Norris,et al.  Electronic Government at the Local Level , 2003 .

[8]  Christopher G. Reddick,et al.  A two-stage model of e-government growth: Theories and empirical evidence for U.S. cities , 2004, Gov. Inf. Q..

[9]  C. Weare,et al.  Designing Web Technologies for Local Governance Reform: Good Management or Good Democracy? , 2000 .

[10]  Evan M. Berman,et al.  Dealing with Cynical Citizens , 1997 .

[11]  M. J. Moon.  The Evolution of E-Government among Municipalities: Rhetoric or Reality? , 2002 .

[12]  M. Berner,et al.  The State of the States: A Review of State Requirements for Citizen Participation in the Local Government Budget Process , 2004 .

[13]  Donald F. Norris,et al.  Is Your Local Government Plugged In? Highlights of the 2000 Electronic Government Survey , 2001 .

[14]  Frances H. Carpenter,et al.  Popular reporting : local government financial reports to the citizenry , 1992 .

[15]  Earl R. Wilson.  Financial reporting by state and local governments : a survey of preferences among alternative formats , 1990 .

[16]  Kelly D. Edmiston.  State And Local E-Government , 2003 .

[17]  Jane Beckette-Camaratta.  Assessing E-Budgeting in US Local Governments : A Case Study , 2002 .

[18]  William Simonsen,et al.  Citizen Participation in Resource Allocation , 1999 .

[19]  R. Meyers.  Is there a key to the normative budgeting lock? , 1996, Policy Sciences.

[20]  Ralph S. Brower,et al.  Three traditions of network research: What the public management research agenda can learn from other research communities , 2004 .

[21]  Unpan.  Benchmarking E-government: A Global Perspective , 2022 .

[22]  William D. Berry,et al.  Innovation and Diffusion Models in Policy Research , 2019, Theories of the Policy Process.

[23]  R. Ingram,et al.  The needs of users of governmental financial reports , 1985 .

[24]  A. Ho,et al.  Explaining the Adoption of E-Government Features , 2004 .

[25]  Lawrence L. Giventer.  Statistical Analysis for Public Administration , 1995 .

[26]  I. Rubin,et al.  Budgeting for Accountability: Municipal Budgeting for the 1990s , 1996 .

[27]  J. Kahn.  Budgeting Democracy: State Building and Citizenship in America, 1890-1928 , 1997 .