Correlates of e-government use in county governments

One hundred and one American counties were selected randomly within predetermined strata and used to study the extent of use of e-government technologies. The study design was cross-sectional and the time period of the study was a single year, 2006. Each website was analyzed to obtain an e-government utilization score. The research objective of this dissertation was twofold: First, to develop an up-to date and comprehensive index of e-government utilization, to be used to evaluate the extent of e-government utilization in county governments. The second objective was to identify the characteristics of those counties that are associated with more extensive utilization of e-government technologies. Counties' use of e-government technology was evaluated using four different levels of utilization; publish, interact, transact, and integrate. This study found that most of the sampled U.S. counties used the web only to publish information and to provide basic unsophisticated services. It was found that counties with larger populations, those in which employees were more professionally oriented toward communicating with citizens, and those that did Information Technology (IT) planning make greater use of egovernment technology. This study found that neither population size nor local per capita wealth is an impediment for extensive use of e-government technology. It seems that within every county that utilizes e-government technology well there is a story as to why that has happened. The most important implication of this study is that the story seems to be related to professionalism. To tell the stories as to how e-government utilization emerges especially in local governments, the quantitative analysis of this study needs to be followed by good qualitative research.