Open government and e-government: democratic challenges from a public value perspective

• Teresa M. Harrison, and others
• Center for Technology in Government

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13 July 2011The authors of this paper consider open government (OG) within the context of egovernment and its broader implications for the future of public administration. They argue that the current US Administration’s Open Government Initiative blurs traditional distinctions between e-democracy and e-government by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled by emerging technology, within administrative agencies. They consider how transparency, participation, and collaboration function as democratic practices in administrative agencies, suggesting that these processes are instrumental attributes of administrative action and decision making, rather than the objective of administrative action, as they appear to be currently treated. The authors propose alternatively that planning and assessing OG be addressed within a “public value” framework. The creation of public value is the goal of public organizations; through public value, public organizations meet the needs and wishes of the public with respect to substantive benefits as well as the intrinsic value of better government. They extend this view to OG by using the framework as a way to describe the value produced when interaction between government and citizens becomes more transparent, participative, and collaborative, i.e., more democratic.

Authors: Teresa M. Harrison, Santiago Guerrero, G. Brian Burke, Meghan Cook, Anthony Cresswell, Natalie Helbig, Jana Hrdinová, and Theresa Pardo.