The New Face of Government: Citizen-Initiated Contacts in the Era of E-Government

Dramatic developments in information technology are transforming society, challenging our nation's many governments to keep pace. As e‐governance grows in popularity, Web pages could well become the new face of government. But how are citizens responding? We suggest that government Web sites may provide a new vehicle for citizen‐initiated contacts with government, and, drawing from the literature on those traditional contacts, we propose a number of hypotheses on citizen interaction with government via the Web. To test those hypotheses, we examine data from a survey concerning how Georgians are contacting government via the Web. We find that citizen visits to governmental Web sites are increasingly common, and as such appear to have become a major new form of the traditional citizen‐initiated contact. To date, however, most of these Web contacts have been made only to obtain information, thus lacking the interactive quality crucial to other citizen‐initiated contacts. As an encouraging finding for government, visitors to governmental Web sites appear to be mostly pleased with their experiences, rating those sites as at least comparable in quality to other Web sites. A discouraging finding, however, is that the demographics of these visitors suggest cause for concern, since the digital divide is even more pronounced among government Web site visitors than among Internet users in general. In the concluding section, we discuss the implications of the findings for government and for future research.