Virtual Policy Networks: Where all Roads Lead to Rome

Government Information Quarterly, 2021

Government webportals are central to governments' web strategy. They are designed to be nodal hubs, or gateways, for encountering government, and as such position government in the online world. Yet the designs of government webportals, particularly their location within wider web ecologies are scarcely studied. In additional to these web ecologies, this paper conceptualises webportals as being located within wider information and institutional ecologies. Methodologically, it comparatively examines the hyperlink structures of the national government webportals of the top ten e-government countries: Australia; Canada; Finland; France; Japan; Netherlands; New Zealand; Singapore; UK; and USA. Different ways governments approach this task are analyzed using webcrawls of the webportals and their neighboring webpages. Variations are considered in relation to the constitutional structures of the countries (i.e. unitary vs federated; centralized vs decentralized). This research highlights information referral versus information repository webportal designs, the latter of which appears to arise more in unitary and city states, than federal states. The hyperlink networks also demonstrate the important structural role of commercial social media websites in half of the countries, revealing a new interactive webportal design. Despite being constructed as whole-of-government entryways, national government webportals typically fail to connect to regional and local tiers of government. The paper provides the basis for assessing the effectiveness of different portal designs and investigating how portal designs arise out of varied government institutional settings.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

What difference does e-government make to the capacity of governments to interact with citizens? How does it affect government's place in social and informational networks -the 'nodality' of contemporary government? What is the structure of 'government on the web' and how do citizens experience government on-line? This paper uses methods from computer science (particularly webmetrics) and political science (a 'tools of government' approach) to go further than previous work in developing a methodology to quantitatively analyse the structure of government on the web, building on . It applies structural metrics (via webcrawling) and user metrics (via user experiments) to the web sites of comparable ministries concerned with foreign affairs in three countries (Australia, the US and the UK). The results are used to assess the on-line presence of the three foreign offices along five dimensions: visibility, accessibility, extroversion, navigability and competitiveness. These dimensions might be developed further as indicators for use by both researchers (to assess e-government initiatives) and by governments (to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their online presence). Governments which are successful in developing their web sites in this way are likely to have greater visibility to citizens, businesses and other governments, strengthening nodality as a policy tool. The governments of most advanced industrial nations have an on-line presence, amounting to thousands of web sites and many millions of web pages in even medium-sized states. But what is the structure of this electronic arm of government and how accessible is it to citizens wishing to interact with government? How does a government's on-line presence affect that government's policymaking capacity?

Over the past decade the World Wide Web has become a core platform for the electronic operation of government. Yet the shape and nature of government presence on the Web and the online community in which it resides remains poorly understood and relatively under theorised. This paper is part of a larger project that utilises large scale web crawling to map the hyperlink network structure between government websites and the broader Web ecology in the UK and Australia. In this paper we utilise Infomap-a state of the art community detection algorithm-to discover 'communities' of websites within a hyperlink network of over 100,000 websites and over 280,000 hyperlinks derived from 88 key UK government seed sites at national, regional (i.e. Scotland and Wales) and local government levels. The principle underpinning the Infomap approach is that flows of information in complex networks reveals community structure. The purposes of analysing online communities in which government websites reside is to identify the different communities operating in this larger network and understand the shared basis for these communities. It is hypothesized that online 'communities' can occur around different policy topics (such as health, education or policing), or along institutional or jurisdictional boundaries (such as England, Scotland and Wales). This paper addresses three main research inquiries. Firstly, what is the nature of the different communities identified in the UK network by the Infomap algorithm, including what types of websites are dominant in each community? Secondly, what role do government websites play in each community and what types of sites are dominant in them? Finally, to what extent are government websites included in the most important communities. Using this novel approach we examine the extent to which government websites are embedded within the most important flows of information on the Web. This research provides foundational knowledge about the role of government websites in the World Wide Web, and the associations that have emerged, and the changing dynamic of state information in the twenty first century. The research may also lead to new strategies for developing government presence on the Web. Preliminary findings suggest that the social media and government seed sites and portals are key players in the network, though there is considerable diversity in their significance and presence based on policy domain and tier of government.

cpsa-acsp.ca

Governing on the Web is a critical aspect of any e-government project as it is the Web that provides the chief platform through which information is disseminated with websites operating as the main information delivery mechanisms. This study analyses policy information on the Web to understand how the hyperlinked organization of webpages, produced by web-enabled policy communities, influences the structure and content of the Web's information supply. It is argued that governing on the Web requires new governing instruments that are designed to manage in technologically-mediated environment which means that governments will no longer simply manage bulk data, but rather govern dense networks of information to manage the information flow. This paper explores the Canadian government's influence on the Web arguing that government capacity online is shaped by the state's nodality in online policy networks.

Government Information Quarterly, 1999

This article describes an empirical study of the current level and type of state and local public activity on the World Wide Web (WWW), providing some important baseline information on government activities in this area. Moving governments onto the WWW represents a paradigm shift in the use of technology, and some governments are moving faster and are becoming more innovative than others. Governments are clearly becoming "cyberactive" but are emphasizing information and services for business and other economic development activities rather than dissemination of policy information, encouraging policy discussions, or delivering public services.

Government Information Quarterly, 2012

Facing economic pressure, social tensions, global competition and low public confidence, governments can no longer afford to address increasingly complex and interdependent public goals alone or step back and rely on the markets. Instead, they have to work through networks of state and non-state actors to organize existing resources, knowledge and capabilities in the pursuit of public goals. The new paradigm increasingly relies on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to connect actors to the network and to build, manage and sustain relationships between them. We refer to such ICT-enabled networks as Government Information Networks. This article serves as an introduction to the current issue of Government Information Quarterly on Government Information Networks. The issue comprises twelve cases of such networks selected from the papers submitted to the 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICE-GOV2010, held in Beijing, China, October 2010. The article also presents a conceptual framework for public administration networks, and applies the framework to describe, analyze and compare the cases, thus relating the volume to the Public Administration literature.

International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 13(2), 2017

Asking such a simple question as what e-government politics really is to policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders in the area and all the more so in a cross-country and cross-institutional manner could be an extremely prolific undertaking since it allows to generate a myriad of unique stories and perspectives about this phenomenon. E-government is a universally well-known concept in public policy, public administration, political and economic sciences and beyond and related academic and professional literature is really rich with demonstrative cases that represent these narratives well from various viewpoints and fields. In this regard, the key purpose of the article is not to update a state-of-the-art in the area but rather an attempt to synthesize and systematize all available institutional perspectives on the development of this truly multidimensional networking phenomenon equally from stakeholder, cross-institutional and cross-country perspectives.

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2006

Although many policy and political scientists have studied the Internet's role in electoral and organizational processes, there is little work that examines the Internet's effect on policy processes. Has the Internet tended to make policy deliberations more inclusive? Has it affected patterns of influence reputation among network participants? Has the Internet helped to bring new organizations into policy debates? This study provides preliminary answers to these questions. Treating policy networks as a type of interorganizational network, a ''socialized'' resource dependence framework is developed. Deployment of the Internet is conceptualized as an exogenous shock, where the shock alters the material resource base of a policy network and allows actors inside and outside the network to challenge structural power holders. Structural power holders attempt to ''mold'' use of the Internet to protect their position and its perquisites. To test this framework data were collected from two policy networks in ''Newstatia''-one focused on adult basic education policy and the other on mental health policy. Both policy networks appear to have become more exclusive since the deployment of the Internet. Electronic central discussion networks (or ''cores'') were primarily populated by actors who were already entrenched in positions of structural power within the network and possessed very high influence ratings. Most Internet communication occurs between members of the electronic core. At least preliminarily, the Internet appears to reinforce existing patterns of authority and influence.

Civic Engagement and Politics, 2019

Asking such a simple question as what e-government politics really is to policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders in the area and all the more so in a cross-country and cross-institutional manner could be an extremely prolific undertaking since it allows to generate a myriad of unique stories and perspectives about this phenomenon. E-government is a universally well-known concept in public policy, public administration, political and economic sciences and beyond and related academic and professional literature is really rich with demonstrative cases that represent these narratives well from various viewpoints and fields. In this regard, the key purpose of the article is not to update a state-of-the-art in the area but rather an attempt to synthesize and systematize all available institutional perspectives on the development of this truly multidimensional networking phenomenon equally from stakeholder, cross-institutional and cross-country perspectives.

Our traditional image of government is often of the Parliament or of bricks and mortar government service delivery offices, such as NHS hospitals or Benefits Agency sites. However, in an online world, government is increasingly seen and experienced through the internet. Moreover, in the online world, government websites can be readily connected into hyperlink networks. What do the online 'footprints' of social policy domains look like? And how do these online social policy networks relate to equivalent offline networks? This paper examines these questions in relation to three policy domains in the United Kingdom, namely: foreign affairs, health and education. It draws on large scale web crawls and sophisticated web metrics and Social Network Analysis techniques to map and compare the shapes of these different policy domains. It explores the shape, nature and make up of these various online networks and the participants in them, including the relevant contribution of non government and commercial websites. It considers whether or not online networks may reflect or contribute to social policy networks, or government ambitions of 'joined up' service delivery, and whether jurisdictional boundaries are evident in the online world. In examining these topics, this paper seeks to provide an empirical and conceptual contribution to understanding 21 st government and service delivery.