Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 5.1
United Nations Top 25 E-government Readiness Rankings, 2012
Rank
Country
Score
1
South Korea
.9283
2
Netherlands
.9125
3
United Kingdom
.8960
4
Denmark
.8889
5
United States
.8687
6
France
.8635
7
Sweden
.8599
8
Norway
.8593
9
Finland
.8505
10
Singapore
.8474
11
Canada
.8430
12
Australia
.8390
13
New Zealand
.8381
14
Liechtenstein
.8264
15
Switzerland
.8134
16
Israel
.8100
17
Germany
.8079
18
Japan
.8019
19
Luxembourg
.8014
20
Estonia
.7987
Source http://www2.unpan.org/egovkb/global_reports/12report.htm
gov/omb/e-gov/ ) , part of a series of initiatives designed to avoid redundancies in
reporting efforts among agencies, with associated provisions to minimize invasions
of privacy. In total, U.S. federal e-government includes tens of millions of individual
webpages, which are typically seen as the most authoritative and ''objective'' source
of information about government and have been used by two-thirds of Americans
online (Jaeger and Thompson 2004 ), most of whom are middle class. Larsen and
Rainie ( 2002 , p. 5) note that ''More Americans have visited government Web sites
than have sought financial information online, made travel reservations, sent instant
messages, or gotten sports scores online.'' More than 3.5 million Americans file
their federal taxes electronically, and the federal job search website USAjobs.com
has attracted tens of millions of visits. More than one-half of Americans report
having used a government website at one time or another.
Adoption of e-government by the various U.S. states, often legitimized by
discourses of ''reinventing government,'' has been spatially uneven (Fig. 5.2 ), with
Michigan and Utah exhibiting the most comprehensive systems according to the
Center for Digital Government. McNeal et al. ( 2003 ) argue that it is the ideological
orientation of state legislatures, not citizen demand, that drives the adoption of
e-government, with Republican-leaning administrations that weigh criteria of
efficiency heavily being the most likely to implement digital measures. Tolbert
et al. ( 2008 ) maintain that state levels of wealth or urbanization are unrelated to
uptake rates of e-government, although median level of education did exert an
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