| Special Workshop Title: | Electronic Government and Philosophy of Law |
| Author: | John Morison and Philip Leith, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom |
| Paper Title: | Government Websites and What They Tell Us about Government Attitudes to Citizens |
| Abstract: | Government portals and
gateways are much more than simply access points to government
departments and the services they offer. They are a concrete expression
of the relationship between Government and the citizen. They can be seen
as spaces which may emphasise to a greater or lesser extent ideas of
efficient service delivery, joined-up government, openness and freedom
of information, social inclusion and, above all, participation in the
business of decision-making. Although often presented in terms merely of
the degree of technological development, websites do not evolve in a
simple process of ascending sophistication. There are very fundamental political
decisions involved in deciding how government will interact with
citizens online. For example, simply putting information online does not
guarantee open government: there are many issues about transparency of
government organisations and the degree of interactivity between citizen
and the state that remain to be resolved in detail.
Indeed it can be argued that the design of government websites is related closely to the very role that government sees itself playing. For example, the SOCITM and IDEA, Local e-government Now: A World Wide View report produced in 2002 characterises e-government development as falling into three broad categories: ‘e-services’, concerned with securing and providing government services by electronic means; ‘e-governance’, concerned with linking up citizens stakeholders and elected representatives to participate in the governance of communities; and ‘e-knowledge’ where the emphasis is on developing the skills and ICT infrastructure to exploit knowledge for competitive advantage. The Republic of Ireland, for example, is characterised particularly as having an ‘e-knowledge’ quality with the emphasis on community based economic and social regeneration. The UK meanwhile is characterised as being within an e-services model. At the same time ideas of ‘modernisation’ are being developed in both jurisdictions as a mechanism to improve public sector performance with ICT being seen as an important part of an effort to develop customer focus and enhance the joined-up quality of government action. Recent reports from the UK indicate that while EU targets for putting government online across European are being pursued (with mixed success), the reality remains that while the internet is being used enthusiastically for shopping, citizens’ take up of online government services is not growing as expected and in some cases seems even to have fallen. Against this background this paper looks critically at the idea of government being the broker of an information society. It reports on research evaluating websites across the world and in particular it contrasts UK Online in the United Kingdom with the New Connections strategy in the Republic of Ireland in order to ask searching questions about the nature and role of e-government as well as the degree to which government seeks to structure the interaction between itself and citizens and the extent to which such interaction can be democratised. |
This page was last updated on: 2003-05-04.