Journal of E‐Government

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2005), "Journal of E‐Government", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 5, pp. 670-671. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510625868

E‐government and e‐democracy are areas where politics and political marketing converge with computing and the internet. There is widespread discussion of e‐democracy, direct democracy and e‐voting in the academic and journalistic press, some suggesting that it encourages participation (above all among younger voters) in an age of political apathy, and others that it is intrinsically insecure and merely a vehicle for government surveillance. In other words, it attracts controversy.

It is useful to differentiate between e‐government (the steps taken by governments to communicate to the community and encourage interactive debate) and e‐democracy (a wide process including informed decision making at all levels of the community, hence e‐government, and expressing itself in various forms of electoral and representational participation, including that by means of e‐voting). Wider still issues hover over the debate, like the digital divide and the supersession of party politics by issue politics and interest group lobbying.

All these issues are increasingly being covered by mainstream politics journals. Haworth itself publishes a reputable one, edited by Bruce Newman, called the Journal of Political Marketing. In 2003, his book Communication of Politics: Cross‐Cultural Theory Building in the Practice of Public Relations was a simultaneous publication with volume 1, numbers 2 and 3 of this journal. In 2003, Haworth also published The World of E‐Government edited by Gregory Curtin (and others), the editor of this new journal under review, and director and research professor in the E‐Governance Lab at the University of Southern California.

The first issue of the Journal of E‐Government has, then, arrived at a good time, and, judging from its editorial board, with widespread endorsement from well‐known players in the field like Nicholas O'Shaugnessy, Andrew Chadwick, Bruce Newman, and Jennifer Lees‐Marshment. Academic and research libraries developing collections to support courses in politics and political marketing will want to consider this newcomer carefully, weighing what you get for the cost (which, for institutions and libraries, is relatively high).

So an immediate test is what this journal offers that we do not already have available. Having sought long and hard for the right mix between general political analysis and discussion of the network and security protocols in e‐government, the newcomer offers something new. Carmen Koch and Michael Salzmann run the e‐government department in the Canton of Zurich in Switzerland, often cited as the home of direct democracy. Speaking from the inside and from experience, they describe the growing application of internet portals for e‐government, the design and structure and effectiveness of the portal in Zurich itself, and the functionality of dynamic browsing. It is frustratingly short but German‐speaking readers can go further through the references.

Equally interesting is Tim Storer and Ishbel Duncan's examination of remote e‐voting, currently being piloted in the UK in the hope of increasing participation in elections. Many voting schemes propose a crytographic model in which a software artefact (called a polster) casts the vote on the elector's behalf. They wonder about the trust and security aspects of this approach and suggest an alternative of “polster‐less” e‐voting, which they then proceed to describe notationally. In this they follow in the footsteps of current UK research (above all that by the Communications and Electronic Security Group into e‐voting security, available by way of www.edemocracy.gov. Plans are in place to introduce such schemes by June 2006, although we shall see about that. Polsterless e‐voting via mobile telephony seems a viable option, although Storer and Duncan examine the verifiability of all this and argue for use of a direct recording electronic machine along the lines of SureVote (www.vote.caltech.edu). They work through the cryptographic protocol in their article.

Also included in the journal is an interesting research note about crossovers between politics and information retrieval in what is called “eRulemaking”, where public comment is analysed, and where inter‐disciplinary collaboration between computer and political people is recommended. The rest of it takes us into familiar mainstream political communication and marketing territory: a study of candidate e‐mails sent out by Jeb Bush and Bill McBride in the 2002 Florida campaign for state governor (where personalization and not mentioning your opponent seemed to work best), a study of legal and social and political issues came out as the most‐searched fields on local authority websites, and a study of e‐government in the USA, where the E‐Government Act was passed in 2003, and where the conclusion is that technology should not drive political processes.

We are looking for something good and something new in this new journal. It is indeed a curate's egg, with some original cross‐over analysis and perceptive commentary in the form of case‐study experience (including an informative piece on Australian e‐democracy), but also with some trite entries and a pompous review of what otherwise seems a useful book in the field, Michael Alvarez and Thad Hall's Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting (The Brookings Institute, Washington, 2004). As with e‐voting itself (rather than e‐democracy, which I think is here to stay), the verdict on this newcomer is that the jury is still out. It covers new territory but how well remains to be seen, and, at the price, pause for thought.