LIST OF PANELS

This panel will discuss trends and developments in digital government and the implications for the policy-making process, public management reform, and the nature of the contemporary state. We call for papers dealing with some aspect of digital government and its relationship with public policy, involving the presentation of new data, methodological innovation, or theoretical development in how we understand digital government.  Papers could cover (but are not restricted to) the following topics and questions: Examples of policy innovation, where digital technologies and widespread use of the internet have opened up new policy options ·New methods for studying and understanding digital government, such as webmetrics or the analysis of ‘big data’ on citizen-government interactions or governmental operations The use of experiments in digital government, making viable new forms of policies and services that ‘nudge’ citizens towards socially optimal behaviour that furthers public good provision. How do digital technologies and widespread use of the internet challenge conventional government approaches to policy formulation and implementation? What approaches are governments taking to use the social web to foster citizen engagement? Are open data intiatives making governments more transparent? How does digital government bring bring new players into the policy process and what is the impact for policy-making? To what extent are internet-based technologies making the policy process more democratic? To what extent can big data approaches be used in policy-making? This list of topics is not exhaustive, and other questions related to government, policy making and the Internet will be considered. All papers will be considered for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Policy and Internet, and offered a fast track evaluation process to account for the conference reviewing process.

Public policy is formulated, designed, implemented and evaluated through the medium of bureaucracy and organizations – the departments and agencies that make up the administrative state. During the last 50 years, these organizations have become increasingly reliant on complex networks of digital technologies, particularly since widespread use of the internet has made it increasingly possible for government-citizen interactions themselves to be digitally mediated. These information systems are policy critical, opening up policy innovations; facilitating more efficient service delivery; and having the potential to strengthen all four ‘tools of government’ (Hood and Margetts, 2007). But when they fail, they can endanger implementation, close off policy options and weaken government’s organizational capacity or nodality. These developments means that after decades where the dominant models for public management reform have been the Weberian model of bureaucracy as epitomized in Progressive Era Public Administration from the late nineteenth century (Hood, 1995) or the New Public Management model, the cohort of changes aimed at bringing business practice into the public sector from the 1980s, Digital Era Governance (Dunleavy and Margetts, 2006; 2013) has emerged as a viable alternative, placing digital technologies at centre stage in public administration. Under this model, new policies and service designs become possible, such as open-book governance, data-driven government, and crowdsourcing as a new form of co-production or even co-creation.  At the same time, governments have struggled to accommodate digital technologies into administrative processes or to make the most of the possibilities that they afford, particularly in terms of managing large-scale computer projects or public-private partnerships with computer services; acquiring the skills and expertise to innovate with web-based platforms’ or to change organizational cultures in a way that fosters new forms of citizen-government interactions. This panel will discuss these trends and developments in digital government and the implications for the policy-making process, public management reform, and the nature of the contemporary state.   References Dunleavy, P., Margetts, H., Bastow, S. and Tinkler, J. (2006, 2008) Digital Era Governance: IT Corporations, the State and e-Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hood, C. (1995) ‘Emerging Issues in Public Administration’, Public Administration, Volume 73, Spring: 165-183. Hood, C. and Margetts, H. (2007) The Tools of Government in the Digital Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Margetts, H. and Dunleavy, P. (2013) ‘The Second Wave of Digital Era Governance: a quasi-paradigm for government on the web’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 371(1987).