Innovating Government: Normative, Policy and Technological Dimensions of Modern Government (Information Technology and Law Series, 20)

The narratives in this book can be positioned against a background of a rapidly
changing societal and policy landscape, both empirically and theoretically, in light
of turbulent technological developments and new social paradigms. Since the mid-
1990s, many Western governments have ‘embraced the idea that new technologies
might be exploited to ‘‘reinvent’’ their own activities.
Hence, fueling the new paradigm of the reinvented government, under the New Public Management
philosophy, and rendering notions of business-like and customer-driven government which are facilitated by the introduction of ICTs in public administration and
a growing inter-connectivity of public organizations and policy spheres. Since then
we have seen transformations in many areas of public administration under the
heading of electronic government or e-government.Electronic government denotes the implementation of information and com-
munication technologies to facilitate or improve the delivery of public services to
citizens and companies. Consequently, the focus of electronic government is
particularly centered on the digitization of transactions between governments and
citizens or business. Electronic government is part and parcel of the transition from
modern society to an information society or in Castells (1996) terms an ‘informational society.’ This marks the shift away from the nineteenth century industrial
society because halfway during the nineteenth century, information and data
became the primary raw materials of Western economies. Obviously, information
is now an important ‘source of productivity and power’ for governments. Technological innovations have promoted information processing opportunities in the public sector and affected many aspects of public administration, e.g., relations between the state and citizens, policy making, law enforcement, etc. and also democratic processes, like e-voting.
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