Information Polity

In a world struggling with a surfeit of misinformation and disinformation, the task of justifying a citizen’s right to reliable information, the so-called ‘right to know’, is urgent and unavoidable. To that end, the article deploys the theory of justice of John Rawls, a leading figure in Anglophone political philosophy in the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. The ‘neo-Rawlsians’ are introduced as a school which has sought to apply Rawlsian thinking to the new age. According to neo-Rawlsians, there is a strong case for information now to be recognised as a primary good belonging to Rawls’s liberty principle. However, the article seeks to break new ground by, instead of treating the right to know as a standalone civil liberty, placing it under what Rawls calls the ‘fair value of political liberty’. The advantage of this move is that it converts it from a ‘negative’ (formal) to a ‘positive’ (proactive) liberty. While reducing its scope, the manoeuvre entails that the state comes under a moral and, hopefully, legal obligation to guarantee that citizens become apprised of important political information, such as election information. The article ends by discussing some of the ways in which neo-Rawlsian thinking might be developed for the digital age.

Local governments responsible for welfare provision regularly outsource information and communication technology (ICT) development and services. Despite the reliance on private-sector ICT firms, little attention has been paid to the capabilities of these firms and their perspective on public-sector digitalization. This paper addresses this research gap by examining how ICT-supplier firms view 1) what constitutes their most important capabilities in the context of public-welfare digitalization and 2) what factors influence their creation and character. The study employs an interpretative research design, using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. The results indicate that ICT suppliers rely on higher-order relational capabilities to enable them to deploy value-adding capabilities. Additionally, the results show that inadequate municipal ICT governance, public-sector coordination, and insufficient procurement practices cause systemic uncertainty, which ICT suppliers are required to manage.

This research examines how citizen participation in local government social media relates to trust in public institutions. The study adopts a qualitative netnographic design, combining observation of government Facebook pages with interviews conducted with active citizens in urban regions of the Brazilian Amazon. This approach enables a deeper understanding of how online interactions reflect citizens’ perceptions of competence, benevolence, and integrity in local governments. The findings reveal distinct levels of participation and trust shaped by the communicative dynamics of social media, demonstrating how digital engagement practices influence citizens’ emotional connection and confidence in governmental actions. Overall, the study highlights the role of social media as both a technological and social space that mediates contemporary relationships between citizens and government.

This article explores how to regain control over digital-induced change by nurturing digital competence through structural arrangements. Digital competence is a critical resource that cannot be limited to hiring people with technological skills in the ICT department, and which implies a broader transformation of the work and professional identities in public sector organizations. Unique in-depth data from a case study of an AI unit established to build internal technological expertise shows how organizational structure can help to empower civil servants and managers to act as catalysts. The AI unit was initially established as a data science lab and then restructured into interprofessional development teams. The two organizational arrangements cultivated different types of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and capabilities. The data science lab fostered competence in experimental work, and the interprofessional development teams fostered collective problem-solving. The findings demonstrate the importance of carefully considering structural arrangements as a resource for building digital competence.

This paper investigates policy documents on digital transformation in the public sector and whether technological optimism also risks obscuring constitutional, democratic, and ethical principles. Two analytical tasks were undertaken: first, we mapped policy documents originating from a multi-level setting; and second, we explored the extent to which constitutional, democratic, and ethical principles are articulated. To explore the extent to which these principles are articulated the concept of a public ethos was utilized. A public ethos contains principles associated with a liberal representative democracy and a Weberian bureaucracy. The analysis underscores the need for research on maintaining a public ethos in politics associated with digital transformation. The policy documents that were analyzed lack ideas concerning democratic legitimacy, legal certainty, ethics in the public encounter, and systems for public scrutiny. The main conclusion is that the space in the documents is dominated by technological optimism, while constitutional, democratic, and ethical principles are given lower priority. The need for further research includes questions concerning (1) conditions for civic participation/party politics, (2) management issues concerning skill/learning development among public employees and on control mechanisms, (3) issues at the frontline of public administration on how the digital transformation affects the treatment of vulnerable/marginalized populations.

This article reviews the co-evolution of public administration reform and digital government transformation in Vietnam from the early reform period to 2025. It demonstrates that digital government in Vietnam has developed not as a stand-alone technological initiative, but as an integral component of long-term administrative reform shaped by political priorities, institutional design, and national development strategies. By tracing successive reform phases and the evolution of e-government and digital government architectures from Version 1.0 to Version 4.0, the study highlights a gradual shift from fragmented, infrastructure-oriented digitization toward a coordinated, architecture-driven model of digital governance. The findings underline the importance of centralized coordination, interoperability, and institutional coherence in sustaining digital government reforms, offering policy-relevant insights for governments pursuing administrative modernization under conditions of institutional continuity.

This paper examines the tension that emerges when policy objectives and regulatory requirements are misaligned. While legislation sets enforceable legal boundaries, policies often offer incentives with less legal force. Through a thought experiment, we investigate whether profit-driven tech firms adhere strictly to legal requirements or pursue financial gains despite potential penalties. Our findings challenge the simplistic assumption that the threat of penalties alone ensures compliance or risk-averse behaviour. Instead, tech firms appear to navigate these misalignments strategically, balancing potential rewards against legal exposure. The study highlights the critical need for governments to better align their regulatory efforts to guide corporate behaviour effectively.