The Internet and related technologies have
dramatically changed the way we live, work, socialize, and even topple national
governments. As the Internet becomes increasingly pervasive across societies,
we find more often that governments adopt Information Communication
Technologies (ICTs) as part of their toolbox for facilitating efficient and
citizen-oriented service delivery at all levels of government. Local governments
across the major industrialized democracies have not been an exception to this
trend and have set sail into the age of digital government. Closest to their
citizens, towns and cities have adopted ICTs to facilitate electronic
government (e-government). While research on local e-government functionality
in terms of information dissemination, service delivery, and citizen engagement
continues at an impressive empirical and methodological pace, gaps in our
knowledge remain. Cross-national comparative research on local e-government
that covers a wide range of municipalities in combination with in-depth case
study analyses is lacking. Informed by a comparative case study approach, this
book seeks to narrow that gap and offer practical policy solutions to
facilitate local e-government. We do so by pursuing both a macro and micro
perspective of e-government functionality in the federal republics of Germany
and the United States and unitary France and Japan. The macro perspective
focuses on the state and scope of e-government functionality
across a large number of randomly selected municipalities of all sizes in these
advanced industrialized countries. Based on a small sample of case studies, the
micro perspective analyzes the successful implementation of e-government in
Seattle (United States), Nuremberg (Germany), Bordeaux (France), and Shizuoka City
(Japan).