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In recent decades, how to achieve good governance via the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has been a critical concern for public administrators and scholars in public administration. In addition to the improvement of ICT infrastructure, governments across the world now pay more attention to the creation of public values though ICT policies. Due to the promising nature of e-governance, it appears that identifying the factors that would help facilitate public value of information technology is extremely important. This research proposes a public value of e-governance framework with three major public values: operational, political and social values, for the development of public value and electronic governance research and national comparison. The framework requires multi-year survey data to ensure its comprehensiveness, feasibility and the continuous updating of subjective indicator data. With three years survey, we find out that the continued enhancement of e-government programs coupled with the elevation of administrative management efficiency and flexibility could lessen the time needed for policy creation and implementation. In addition, Internet might trigger e-participation, therefore government should continue to strive toward open government (including information and data disclosure) and pushing for all kinds of online citizen engagement mechanisms.

E-government uses information and communication technology to provide citizens with information about public services. Less pervasive, e-democracy offers greater electronic community access to political processes and policy choices. Few studies have examined these twin applications separately, although they are widely discussed in the literature as distinct. The authors, Chung-pin Lee of Tamkang University and Kaiju Chang and Frances Stokes Berry of Florida State University, empirically analyze factors associated with the relative level of development of e-government and e-democracy across 131 countries. Their hypotheses draw on four explanations of policy change—learning, political norms, competition, and citizen pressures. All four explanations are strongly linked to nations where e-government policy is highly advanced, whereas a country’s e-democracy development is connected to complex internal factors, such as political norms and citizen pressures.

Part 2: Services and Interoperability; International audience; The role of trust is a significant element in the digital channel. While most studies have examined how the idea of trust has affected users’ behaviors and developed integrative models of e-government, little attention has been paid to its critical role as a factor affecting citizens’ preference toward certain service channels. There is no systematic investigation to compare different types of channel choices by differentiating between primary public service deliveries such as government information, application and transaction, and e-participation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how to perceive the role of trust as a possible determinant of service choice, in terms of different types of government services. Using survey data collected in Taiwan 2011, this study utilized a multinominal logistic analysis to examine the proposed models. The findings suggest that the different types of channel choices can be influenced by certain critical elements such as, political trust, trust in the Internet, and risk concern.

This chapter examines the case of an online survey regarding the assessment of the tax return filing system in Taiwan. The aim is to illustrate the strengths and limitations of utilizing on-line surveys to evaluate the performance of e-government. Based on our findings, we propose suggestions pertaining to increasing the quality of the survey as well as how to collaborate with a government agency while conducting a survey concerning sensitive issues. This is pioneering, and perhaps is the first attempt to address the methodological and administrative issues of an on-line survey in collaboration with the public sector. We invite and encourage future efforts to confront such issues, to advance and enrich methodological discussions, and to make online survey a useful tool for evaluating government performance not only with regard to e-government effects but also on other programs.

Since the early 1990s, the trend of e-government has attracted scholarly attention to the issue of how governments apply the information and communication technologies (the ICTs) in different services. While most studies focus on “what” and “how” questions of e-government, relatively little literature addresses the issue of “to what effect” it has on citizens. To fill this void, from user-centric perspective, this study examines Taiwan’s e-government performance, which has been ranked by international institutions as one of the top performers worldwide. The authors use a telephone interview data set from a survey conducted in 2007 with a random sample of 2000 respondents to analyze what impact the ICTs applications in administrative service and democracy improvement have on citizens in terms of cost and benefit. The authors’ findings show that e-government has had a significant, positive impact on citizens regarding their time saving, perception of information credibility, and satisfaction with the government. The results also suggest that the ICTs facilitate broader distribution of political information, a key to the success of e-democracy. The authors conclude this chapter by proposing suggestions for further strategic planning and critical research issues.

This chapter introduces a case of e-deliberation in Taiwan. Democratic deepening can be achieved by the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs), based upon their ability to connect people at a relatively low cost. Following the theories and application of deliberative democracy and e-government, experimentation is increasingly being conducted to answer the critical question: “will ICTs help?” It offers a quasi-experimental design of two citizen conferences held simultaneously in the Beitou area of Taipei, Taiwan; one face-to-face and the other online, with all other factors being equal. The results suggest that whilst online conferencing is as good as face-to-face conferencing on all fronts (with the single exception of time constraints), the expansion of e-deliberation to county- or national-level issues presents significant challenges. More evidence from further experimentation will be required to form viable strategies for fulfilling the “e-dream” of revitalizing democracy through ICTs at community, local, and national levels.