The coming of age of e-government studies

The earliest studies of the impact of information technolog y n government were undertaken in the United States in the 1970s by pioneering scholars such as Joh n King, James Perry and Ken Kraemer. In the mid 1980s, the centre of gravity in this research moved to Eur pe with the founding of the Permanent Study Group on Informatization under the aegis of the Europe an Group of Public Administration (EGPA) conference in 1986. Over the past twenty-five years, t hi study group has produced a rich vein of scholarship and, now renamed Permanent Study Group on e-G ov rnment, it continues to add new insights and ideas to this body of knowledge. The study of e-government requires many different perspect ives and levels of study. We need to understand specific practices, but we should also understan d how these practices relate to broader developments in government and society. We need strong empi rical analyses, but we must not neglect the need to develop new theoretical perspectives on e-gover nment. A variety of approaches is required to understand and debate the rapid evolution of ICT use in and by government. The papers in this issue consider e-government from a variety of angles and contain i mportant messages for practice as well as provocative implications for theory. These include consid ering how the impact of the Internet affects the structure of government, the relationship between opennes s and trust, the effectiveness of coordination mechanisms, how technology can integrate values and the fut ure nature of the regulatory state. This special issue of Information Polity presents the best p apers from the meeting of the permanent study group of the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) at EGPA’s annual conference in Toulouse in September 2010. The contributions show how rich our field of study has become and how researchers have developed a complementary variety of rese arch approaches to a wide range of research questions. The contributions range from worldwide develop ments (Bannister and Wilson) to specific local systems (Alfano); from theoretical discussions of ne w public management and public governance (Trotta et al.) to an empirical study of the relation between tra sparency and spin (Grimmelikhuijsen); from comparative empirical work of government policies for c ordinating service delivery (Van Os) to a normative analysis of e-government (Bannister and Wilson ). As chairs of the EGPA study group we are proud to present this b road selection of papers. The papers show how our research community has matured and how we contin ue to find ways to advance our field through both empirical studies and theoretical analyses. W hat is particularly encouraging is that all but one of these papers have been written by PhD-students or youn g researchers who have only recently completed their doctorates. This young generation is build ing upon work done by established scholars since the group first met in 1986. It is greatly encouraging to see that, 25 years on, new, insightful and stimulating work continues to be produced. We also note t hat the field is slowly becoming more international. Until quite recently, most of the publicati ons emerging from the study group came from the North-European countries. This special issue includes two excellent papers from Italy. There is now a growing amount of research emerging from southern and East ern European countries as well as from