Information Polity

This study examines how Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) could be incorporated into municipal administration to improve citizen participation and transparency. As DAOs in governance are attracting growing academic and practical attention, this research uses scenarios to analyze the conditions for their application at municipal and regional levels. It takes a conceptual, scenario-based approach to develop a model for DAO-based e-participation, identifying key concepts and their relationships to explain how DAOs operate as self-regulated systems for digital participation. The research is structured into three phases: First, in the foundational phase, this study synthesizes existing research on DAOs and participatory governance models, contrasting blockchain-based and traditional processes to establish a framework for DAO integration. Second, the application phase uses illustrative scenarios to explore how DAO mechanisms might influence participation and decision-making in municipalities. Third, the evaluation and recommendation phase consolidates insights into a structured model for implementation, highlighting task characteristics, contextual conditions, and organizational capacities that shape DAO feasibility. The analysis suggest that DAOs may enable new forms of participation and more transparent procedures, but only when antecedent conditions such as digital literacy, administrative capacity, and infrastructure stability are sufficiently met. Future work should look at long-term effects, compare cases across municipalities, and examine the role of legal and regulatory frameworks.

This study examines how national-level ICT development, cybersecurity governance, and government capacity influence subjective well-being across 169 countries. As digital interactions increasingly influence daily life, cyberspace has emerged as a critical policy domain for each country with substantial implications for citizen welfare. Using cross-national indices and multivariate analyses, we find that cybersecurity governance has a significant and positive association with subjective well-being, with the association being notably stronger in high income countries than middle income countries. In contrast, broader ICT infrastructure quality and access do not consistently predict well-being outcomes. The findings call into question infrastructure-led models of digital development, pointing instead to the importance of institutional capacity. By reframing cyberspace as a core extension of state responsibility in the digital age, this study contributes to the broader discourse on digital-era public governance and calls for a shift toward citizen-centred, context-sensitive approaches to cyberspace governance.

Two different external socio-technical developments – the (ecological) sustainability transition and the digital transition – require governments to build the capability to respond and lead the way. While there is extensive literature on the sustainable transition and on the digital transition, so far limited attention has been paid to the interconnectedness of these transitions. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of the government capabilities needed to make this ‘twin transition’ work, is lacking. In this study, we aim to bring these separate strands of literature together to identify the required government capabilities for the twin transition. Based on a narrative literature review, we identify institutional, organizational and individual capabilities and highlight interfaces between these levels. We conducted an exploratory test of the value of the framework in two Dutch cities. Our research results in a multilevel conceptual framework of government capabilities for the twin transition. This framework enables governments to strategically develop their capabilities and provides a basis for further academic research on this topic.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for digital transformation in public sector governance, particularly in Southern African parliaments. However, limited empirical research has examined how digital transformation unfolded within parliamentary institutions in the Global South. This study examines the barriers, benefits, and enablers of digital transformation in Southern African parliaments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on empirical evidence from parliamentary actors, the paper shows that digital transformation was not a linear or purely technical process, but a context-dependent governance response shaped by structural constraints, institutional capacity, and leadership agency. Key barriers included financial limitations, infrastructure gaps, digital skills deficits, and cybersecurity concerns, all of which influenced the pace and scope of digital adoption. Despite these challenges, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for innovation, enabling parliaments to maintain legislative continuity, improve operational efficiency, and expand access to parliamentary information.

However, the findings reveal that these benefits were uneven and conditional, with rural connectivity gaps and high data costs limiting inclusive participation. The study demonstrates that digital transformation outcomes depend on the interaction between barriers, benefits, and enablers, with leadership playing a critical mediating role. It further argues that the democratic value of digitalization is contingent upon equitable access and institutional readiness. The paper contributes to digital governance research by advancing a context-sensitive understanding of parliamentary digital transformation in the Global South.

Digital transformation in local government represents an institutional rather than a purely technical process. It unfolds under conditions of resource scarcity, vendor dependency, and competing accountability demands, conditions particularly pronounced in municipalities operating at the margins of administrative capacity. This study examines how local government actors in a German regional context interpret and enact digital transformation within these constraints. Drawing on six focus groups with thirty officials from twenty-five municipalities, it combines the Technology–Organization–Environment framework with Suchman's legitimacy typology into an integrated TOE–L analytical model. The analysis identifies two interrelated mechanisms of legitimacy work: legitimacy–capacity decoupling and guerrilla legitimation. Both illustrate how administrations sustain credibility when reform ambitions exceed capacity. Together, these dynamics constitute reflexive legitimacy work, that is, the conscious management of symbolic and practical tensions in digital reform. Conceptually, the study reframes legitimacy as an operational capability of governance. It advances institutional and public management theory by showing how local administrations govern through legitimacy under constraint.

Government efforts to regulate sustainability depend on the quality, comparability, and verifiability of information flows from regulated organizations to oversight bodies. In many emerging economies, ESG reporting is still produced through spreadsheets, surveys, or stand-alone disclosure tools outside authoritative accounting systems, weakening auditability, increasing reconciliation costs, and limiting transaction-level verification. Drawing on digital government research on regulatory information infrastructures, machine-readable regulation, and data-driven regulatory delivery, this paper argues that ESG oversight is fundamentally an information-governance problem: enforceability depends on standardized semantics, controlled provenance, and interoperable reporting pipelines that support automated validation and traceable auditing. The paper develops a conceptual design synthesis integrating (i) digital government and regulatory information infrastructure scholarship, (ii) sustainability accounting and environmental management accounting (EMA), and (iii) ERP and management accounting change. It specifies an implementable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)-to-regulator architecture and derives three analytical propositions concerning embedding depth, traceability, and scope conditions. Using SAP FI/CO as an illustrative example, the framework embeds sustainability attributes within routine accounting objects and control processes. It operationalizes this through three levers: (1) an ESG chart-of-accounts addendum, (2) carbon and energy sub-ledgers for cost-object and asset-level attribution, and (3) machine-readable ERP-to-regulator reporting (API/XBRL-style) with validation rules, access controls, provenance logging, and exception workflows. Bangladesh is used as an illustrative policy context rather than an empirical case study. The paper's contribution is a regulator-ready conceptual architecture that links ERP-based accounting infrastructure to ESG auditability and regulatory enforceability, offering a pathway to scale sustainability assurance in ERP-mature sectors without creating parallel reporting stacks.

Emergent digital technologies keep redefining the (porous, yet analytically useful) online/offline participation dichotomy, yet the study of this evolution remains fragmented across the fields of public management, digital governance, and civic culture. Drawing on a narrative literature review, this article offers a conceptual synthesis of three central debates at the intersection of digital media and citizen participation. First, whether online participation constitutes an authentic form of citizen involvement. Second, whether digital media fundamentally expand the repertoire of participatory practices or simply replicates offline forms in digital environments. Third, whether online participation mobilizes or demobilizes traditional offline participation. Anchored in a sociotechnical perspective, this article offers explanations of how affordances from emergent technologies and evolving citizenship norms are shaping offline and online participatory practices.

Points for Practitioners

While online participation can mobilize offline participation, it can also lead to passive involvement (slacktivism), making it essential to design digital initiatives that encourage deeper citizen participation.

This article presents a longitudinal analysis of Czech citizens’ attitudes toward e-Government services before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using two original surveys (n=611 in 2019, n=613 in 2021), the study examines whether support for digitalisation, awareness of digital tools, perceived benefit, and actual usage changed during the pandemic. While general support remained high in both years, findings show minimal change in public behaviour, with usage growing only modestly and awareness remaining low. Structural divides, especially by age, education, and digital literacy, largely persisted. The pandemic amplified existing engagement among some users but did not substantially transform underlying attitudes. The article concludes with recommendations for inclusion-focused policies, simplified service design, and strategic communication.

This study explores evidence-based urban planning (EBUP) within three secondary cities in the Global South—eThekwini, Khorog, and Bosaso—emphasizing public sector capacity to utilize data in urban management. Amidst the proliferation of data and advanced analytical tools, many local administrations struggle with effective data use due to limited resources, technology, and governance frameworks. This paper examines how urban planners mobilize, integrate, and apply data to create actionable evidence for city planning, considering the socio-political and technological landscapes that influence these processes. By analyzing qualitative data from interviews and case studies, this research highlights the challenges and potential of EBUP to address urban issues in data-scarce environments. The concept of good enough evidence is explored, advocating for practical, adaptable, and locally tailored planning efforts that prioritize immediate urban needs over exhaustive data collection. This approach seeks to balance ambition with practicality, offering a pragmatic pathway for cities facing constraints in resources and capabilities.

Various scholars have pointed to a need for responsible algorithmization to minimize risks and harm and maintain citizen trust in government use of algorithms. They highlight the importance of an organizational focus to the responsible implementation of algorithmic systems in the public sector. Empirical knowledge about practices of responsible implementation in government is scarce. To develop a practice-based understanding of responsible algorithmization, this empirical study examines such practices within the Netherlands Police. I employ a qualitative interpretive analysis of scavenged material to understand the relationship between organization and responsible algorithmization practices. The findings show that the traditional ‘bureaucratic response’ to new challenges, which typically involves creating rules, procedures and positions can both facilitate and impair responsible algorithmization. The research highlights the necessity of balancing bureaucratic practices with innovative approaches to achieve responsible algorithmization. Therefore, I propose that, in addition to the bureaucratic response, organizations should simultaneously invest in pragmatic short-term solutions and more durable long-term structural changes.

Due to digitalisation, automation, and the use of artificial intelligence in policy implementation, public administrations are adapting their workflows and organisational structures. We explore the impact of the digital transformation on the nature of tasks as well as the subsequent (potentially) changing demand for competences and job profiles in public executive agencies, based on a comparative case study and semi-structured interviews with over 60 public servants from three key administrative services in Germany – electronic tax returns, internet-based vehicle registrations, and digital building applications. The findings reveal less complex tasks being partially substituted and core discretionary tasks being standardised. We highlight the emergence of “work for digitalisation” that often remains “invisible”, including “compensating work” (scanning, IT support), “connecting work” (software maintenance) and “cleaning work” (validating data), resulting in an overall increased workload. Additionally, there is a need for role-specific new competences and upskilling of middle-level public servants. Our results indicate a potential substitution of traditional administrative job profiles but a growing demand for highly skilled, academically trained public servants. The findings therefore challenge the notion that digitalisation and automation threaten human labour or effectively counteract staff shortages. Rather, (potential) benefits, burdens, and job perspectives are distributed unevenly across job profiles.

A smart city approach places citizens at the center of decision-making. However, only a small proportion of citizens actually engage in participatory initiatives. Although citizen participation has been extensively studied, limited empirical evidence exists on how citizens’ awareness of participatory initiatives relates to both their participation and their perception of municipal efforts to promote participation. This paper analyses these relationships using a Propensity Score Matching (PSM) approach based on survey data from a medium-sized city in Argentina. Since the factors associated with participation and perceptions of municipal promotion may also shape citizens’ awareness of government programs, PSM is used to improve comparability between aware and non-aware citizens and to examine the association between awareness of participatory initiatives and participation outcomes. The results show statistically significant differences in both participation propensity and perceptions of municipal promotion between citizens who are aware of these initiatives and those who are not. Awareness is positively associated with prior civic engagement, visiting the municipal website and age, and negatively associated with being a woman. Policy implications highlight the importance of disseminating successful participatory experiences and strengthening communication strategies to encourage broader citizen engagement.

Smart cities increasingly rely on ICT-based coproduction, in which governments use digital platforms to engage citizens in reporting problems and requesting public services. While this model is often assumed to enhance inclusivity, it also raises equity concerns, as opportunities for engagement and experiences with coproduction may vary systematically across social groups. Existing research on ICT-enabled coproduction has focused primarily on participation disparities, offering mixed evidence and often overlooking inequities in earlier and later stages of engagement. Drawing on individual-level data from the San Francisco City Survey, this study examines equity across multiple stages of coproduction—including awareness of opportunities, participation, channel choice, and satisfaction—and across multiple dimensions of equity, encompassing procedural and experiential outcome. The findings show that inequities emerge at different stages for different groups, highlighting the need for ICT-based coproduction systems that address equity beyond participation alone.

This study integrates critical AI scholarship with relational communication theories to explain how AI language modifications shape the quality of government–citizen communication. Distinguishing between informational-cognitive quality (clarity, ease of response) and expressive-constitutive quality (politeness, respectfulness, feeling heard, trust, urgency, empathy), we hypothesize that AI yields uncontested benefits for the former but contested effects for the latter, potentially enhancing relational markers while muting authentic emotional cues. Using a vignette-based survey with 220 citizens and 214 civil servants in China, we assess perceptions across five interaction contexts: service requests, policy inquiries, complaints, suggestions, and emergencies. Results from paired t-tests and mixed-effects regressions support the claim that AI enhances both informational-cognitive and expressive-constitutive quality from the perspectives of citizens and civil servants, with significant improvements in clarity, politeness, satisfaction, trust, and empathy, but provide no consistent evidence of urgency or empathy signals. These findings suggest that concerns over algorithmic emotional flattening may be overstated or context-specific; they offer theoretical insights into AI-mediated public interactions and practical implications for fostering trust and efficiency in digital governance.

Burnout among healthcare professionals is a critical issue that significantly impacts employee well-being, patient care, and healthcare outcomes. As digital transformation in the public sector progresses, healthcare has not been exempted from these changes. This paper leverages the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model to explore how mobile technology impacts burnout, positing it as a dual factor in this dynamic. Mobile technology, while streamlining operations and improving access to information, also introduces new demands that could potentially exacerbate professional burnout. Conversely, it can be a valuable resource, offering tools that mitigate stress and enhance productivity. This conceptual paper redefines mobile technology's role within healthcare, viewing it through the lens of digital transformation in the public sector. It provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the interplay between technology and burnout, highlighting how digital tools influence healthcare professionals’ stress levels and job satisfaction. Additionally, the study offers actionable insights for healthcare organizations navigating the complexities of mobile technology integration. These insights are crucial for managing the dual aspects of technology as both a facilitator and a challenge within the healthcare workplace, ensuring that its deployment effectively supports staff well-being and enhances overall healthcare delivery.

This study investigates the impact of e-Government initiatives on public happiness through ordered probit analysis. Utilizing data from two distinct sources—a survey measuring happiness levels and a provincial e-Government Index—the research uncovers significant insights. Specifically, it identifies a notable negative relationship between the advancement of e-Government initiatives and public happiness levels. Robustness tests, instrumental variable analyses, and heterogeneity assessments further substantiate these findings. Moreover, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the influence of technological advancements in public sector on citizen happiness. It underscores the necessity for nuanced policy interventions to align technological progress with societal welfare objectives. These findings offer valuable guidance for policymakers navigating the evolving landscape of digital governance practices in their pursuit of enhancing citizen well-being.

Although research on the digitalization of public services has focused on many different areas, the role of digital public services (DPS) in shaping citizens’ well-being is a rather under-researched topic. This study investigates how inequalities and internet usage influence the relationship between digital public services (DPS) and individual well-being. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the digitalization paradox, and broader theories of digital inclusion, we analyse individual- and country-level data from 24 European countries across three waves: 2018, 2020, and 2022. DPS are operationalized using the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), a composite indicator developed by the European Commission to assess digital performance and progress across EU member states. Multi-level analysis was used to investigate the relationship between DPS and life satisfaction and to uncover whether this is moderated by use of the internet and inequalities related to the four main drivers of digital access: age, gender, income, and education. Our findings reveal a counterintuitive trend: higher levels of DPS are associated with lower reported well-being, particularly among individuals presumed to possess advanced digital skills. These results underscore the need for more inclusive and human-centered approaches to digital public service design.

Data analytics (DA) use has been frequently considered a transformational practice in the public sector, particularly in terms of its potential for data-driven decision making by local governments. Despite growing interest from academics and practitioners, empirical research on what cities are actually doing regarding DA and how is still relatively scarce, particularly in terms of a focus on specific activities and processes. Based on a socio-technical view, this paper examines a local government’s experience with DA use and how DA can be seen as a process and transformational practice. Results reveal that DA practices go beyond the use of specific technologies and involve collaborative efforts to formulate meaningful problems and prepare data for specific uses. Indeed, problem formulation is an essential step where collective discussions and assessment by technical and nontechnical DA practitioners occurs. Our findings suggest that (1) data analytics viewed as a socio-technical process involves data management and analysis, but also collaborative processes between multiple city agencies, (2) collaborative efforts go beyond data analytics and include data collection, data representation, and problem formulation; and (3) formulating the problem in a collaborative manner could be considered an important first step when using data analytics for decision-making in local governments. Furthermore, collaborative problem formulation in DA seems to be affected by specific variables related to the collaborative effort such as leadership, governance, and technology.

This study investigates the significant influence of patriarchy on the potential acceptance and use of local digital government innovations in resource-constrained countries, building on studies that highlight patriarchy’s impactful role in shaping innovation. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was adopted as the evaluation theory ( n = 270) using Ethiopia as a case study. The results from structural equation modeling (SEM) reveal that patriarchy moderates the relationship between facilitating conditions and usage behavior. Contrary to conventional assumptions, we found that despite facing systemic barriers, women demonstrated higher engagement levels with the local digital innovation compared to their male counterparts, even when they did not perceive direct job-related benefits. This revelation not only challenges prevailing gender stereotypes but also underscores the resilience of women in circumventing patriarchal constraints. The study significantly contributes to theory by contextualizing the UTAUT model within a patriarchal framework, bringing out how societal norms and gender dynamics shape technology adoption in public sector settings. Practically, our findings advocate for gender-sensitive policies and interventions to bridge digital divides, emphasizing the need for inclusive strategies that account for underlying societal structures. By providing empirical evidence from a resource-constrained setting, this research offers important insights for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers aiming to foster equitable digital engagement and harness the full potential of digital government innovations.