Citizen interaction with e-government: From the streets to servers?

This article examines citizen interaction with e-government. Much of the existing work on the development of e-government has explored it from a supply-side perspective, such as evidence presented from surveys of what governments offer online. The demand side explanation, which is relatively unexplored, examines citizen interaction with e-government and is the focus of this article. E-government presently has evolved into two identifiable stages. The first stage is the information dissemination phase in which governments catalogue information for public use. The second phase is transaction-based e-government in which there is e-service delivery such as paying taxes online. This article argues that the information and transaction phases are closely intertwined with the street-level bureaucracy literature. Various attributes of citizen interaction with electronic government will be tested in this article. One notable finding was that the Internet improved the ability for e-citizens to interact with government, acknowledging some initial movement from street-level to system-level bureaucracies.