E-Government: Towards a Public Administration Approach

In public administration science and practice, the debate on e-government concentrates on service delivery, information and technology. This article argues that we need a broad public administration approach towards e-government that surpasses this technocratic emphasis. Public administration theory helps us to escape from the conceptual prison of the information management ideology that currently dominates e-government. Both the locus of e-government (the parts of public administration that are being touched by it) and its focus (its approach towards governance) can be used to broaden the concept. If we do not enrich e-government, many of its possibilities will remain unexploited. Also, if we stick to the information management approach, e-government will endanger the very foundations of the legitimacy of public administration.

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