Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In Germany, e-government implementation started slowly and has lagged
behind other countries, in part due to the lack of coordination among the various
Länder (Klumpp
2002
; Eifert
2004
; Siegfried
2007
). Based on an analysis of web
pages, Wohlers (
2009
) concludes that e-government in Germany is more wide-
spread than it is in the U.S., but less sophisticated. The BundOnline 2005 program
aims to offer federal government services over the internet, but as yet most
websites are confined to one-way provision of information rather than transac-
tional relations. E-government has been unevenly adopted among the various
German länder and cities (Schuppan
2009
), with widely varying local effects. The
Dutch government has plunged enthusiastically into e-government, only to con-
front a variety of responses from citizens based on the perceived usefulness,
degree of risk, experience of users, and level of trust (Horst et al.
2007
), all of
which are central to understanding the contingent nature of this process. In the
Dutch case, as elsewhere, a flexible politics of national-local collaboration is
critical to successful e-government adoption (Bekkers
2009
).
Scandinavian e-government strategies include a variety of attempts to place
these countries at the helm of global network societies and today exhibit some of
the world's most comprehensive systems for the delivery of public information
and services electronically (Anderson et al.
2005
). The ''Digital Denmark'' pro-
gram, for example, sought to harness information technology to democratize
access to public information Falch and Henten (
2000
). In Sweden, e-government
implementation has been marked by the absence of substantive national admin-
istrative reforms (Löfgren
2007
) and an enormous number of local applications;
Giritli Nygren (
2009
) quotes one local development authority as saying '' there are
290 local authorities in Sweden, and there've been 290 different ways forward.''
Similarly, in Finland, e-governance unfolded in a complex medley of national and
local governments (Hyyryläinen
2004
), in which municipal governments play a
key role: the city of Tampere, Finland, for example, allows citizens to provide
urban planners with their views and experiences (Jaeger
2003
). In contrast, despite
its abundant information technology network, Norwegian cities often exhibit
surprisingly rudimentary e-government applications (Flak et al.
2005
).
France exhibits well developed e-government, including easy access to gov-
ernment forms, legislation, libraries, public transportation information, and tax
payments. The core of the French government's e-government strategies go back
to its formation of the Government Action Programme for an Information Society
(PAGSE) in 1998 (Chatillon
2004
). The national one-stop e-government portal
mon.service-public.fr offers easy access to government forms, legislation, librar-
ies, public transportation information, and tax payments. Users may create per-
sonal accounts to track information and pay taxes. Almost all of the country's
schools are connected to the Internet, with important implications for the nature of
education. Some municipalities, such as Issy-les-Mollineaux, have experimented
with cyber-voting. In the 2007 French presidential election, 1.3 million people
submitted digital votes out of a total of 43 million. However, French departments,
the primary unit of local authority, vary in their rate of adoption: those in the
