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Survey findings from Florida reveal that larger, higher risk communities perceive greater budgetary trade-offs, a view that supports in part the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s recently implemented strategy in distributing its grants. Per expectations, city managers with graduate education saw higher levels of readiness and lower threat risk than fire chiefs. Consistent with prior research, cities were reprogramming and using existing funds rather than new levies for homeland security initiatives. This finding was buttressed by results that recently enacted property tax limits and cuts in federal aid were seen as the greatest challenges to increased funding. Contrary to mainstream public administration writing, our respondents stated that restrained funding rather than intergovernmental coordination was the biggest issue they faced in meeting homeland security needs. Overall, our respondents saw a low risk of terror threat, a perception that may represent an accurate read of the operating environment or an implicit belief that higher levels of government will provide significant assistance in the event of a major terrorist attack or other conflagration.

An exciting opportunity that many advanced industrial democracies faced in the late 1990s was the movement from budgetary deficit to surplus. This came after years of persistent deficits. Traditional decisionmaking theories such as budgetary incrementalism failed to explain this longrun relationship, since it has been inherently a short-run theory. This paper uses rational expectations theory to demonstrate its relationship to budgetary decision-making reforms and the deficit (surplus) for Canada, the UK and the United States. The results demonstrated that there was an intertemporal budget constraint in operation in the three countries, and decision-makers at the macro level used rational expectations in the formulation of their annual budget. In the theory, budget actors strived to balance their budget, but did so over the longrun as opposed to the short-run incrementalist interpretation.

This paper aims to explore the determinants of citizens’ future use of mobile applications provided by government. Research on citizen-initiated contacts with government has focused on both non-technology and technology related contacts. Existing research, however, has not examined the impact of mobile applications or “apps” on citizen-initiated contacts with government. Furthermore, existing research has not examined satisfaction with mobile government and whether this impacts future use.

The authors examine future use of mobile apps through an empirical analysis of a public opinion survey of citizen users in four of the largest cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen).

Using ordered logistic regression analysis, this study found that the strongest predictors of future use were demand and satisfaction with mobile apps. However, there was no wide-scale evidence of socioeconomic status and age impacting mobile apps future use.

The findings in this study contribute to both theory and practice of the determinants of mobile government adoption.

The results challenge the citizen-initiated contact theory, as socioeconomic status was not a major predictor of mobile apps future use in China. The results further indicate that satisfaction was a good predictor of mobile apps future use.

This article evaluates quantitatively the impact of four common budget approaches on disaggregated United States state spending data in the 1990s. Pooled time series cross sectional data of the 50 states is used to test the impact of incremental, program, zero-based, and performance-based budgeting on the dependent variables state total and functional expenditures. The results demonstrated that there was support for all of these approaches in terms of their impact on state budget outputs. These findings imply that budget decision-making should focus more on a system-wide approach, which takes into account many of the characteristics of these rival models, rather than exclusively focusing on each one singly. A possible suggestion is a hybrid form of budgeting, which is a combination of incremental and rational approaches.

This article examines the development of the Internet and electronic procurement or e-procurement in American state governments. I am interested in discerning the extent of adoption of e-procurement, especially as it relates to the use of the Internet in the procurement function. Specifically, eprocurement is examined with data from a national survey of state procurement officers. The first part of this article demonstrates an e-government growth model as a way of modeling the development of e-procurement. The second part examines the existing literature on e-procurement development and challenges associated with its implementation. The third part constructs an eprocurement index, which measures the adoption rate of electronic procurement in each of the states. This e-procurement index is tested against management, organizational, and economic predictor variables. The results of the eprocurement model indicated positive support for electronic procurement on state management capacity and IT management capacity, indicating that high performing management is a critical catalyst for e-procurement development.

Three rival internal change theories of budgeting have characterized the twentieth century. Internal change theories consider the importance of change made inside governments; exogenous factors do not have a significant bearing on outcomes in these approaches. The century started out with the rational/scientific, then moved to incrementalism by mid to latecentury. The century ended with the garbage can model. This paper tests the descriptive power of each of these models on budget outcome data. The methods used in this study were time series modeling of monthly U.S. national government budget outcomes from 1968 to 1999. The results provide support for both incrementalism and rational/scientific budgeting. There was no support found in this study for the anarchical tendencies associated with the garbage can theory of budgeting. These results suggest that the garbage can model may not deserve its reputation as the dominant budgeting paradigm at the close of the twentieth century.

This paper tests public budgeting as a long-run and short-run process; political decision makers strive to head toward budgetary balance over the long run but are constrained in the short run and follow incremental decision-making. First, the budget equilibrium theory is stated and is used to explain the relationship between revenues and expenditures. Second, the interaction between expenditures and revenues is tested with a vector error correction model for Canada, UK and the US, using annual time series data between 1948 and 2000. The results show that, in the long-run, revenues are the driving force behind the budget in Canada; in the UK expenditures force the budget toward balance. In the short-run, incrementalism occurs in both of these countries. The most interesting finding is for the United States where on-budget revenues and expenditures both push the budget toward balance over the longrun but there is no incrementalism in the process in the short-run. This, of course, is contrary to much of the existing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to apply Moore’s public value model into the context of e-government research by examining online financial transparency as both an organizational goal and as a driving force for financial sustainability and public officials’ corruption. The empirical context comprises the state governments in the USA.

Structural equation modeling is used to examine the relationship between specific contextual factors of the authorizing environment, financial sustainability, public official corruption and online budget transparency.

The results show that contextual factors like population explain online financial transparency, while financial sustainability and corruption had moderating and negative effects.

Governments that struggle with issues of financial sustainability and corruption will rely more on online financial transparency. Transparency increases detection of public corruption.

The effects of financial transparency and financial sustainability on corruption have been studied separately. This study fills the gap of understanding the effects of both on corruption as one phenomenon.

This paper aims to examine citizen interaction with e‐government using three e‐participation models. The two major research questions of this paper are: what is the current level of e‐participation in the USA?; and what factors explain why citizens participate in online government?

Survey evidence of citizens in the USA and their use of e‐participation is examined using quantitative methods.

Citizens were most likely to use e‐participation for management activities. Citizens were much less likely to use the internet for more advanced consultative and participatory activities. Using regression analysis, factors such as demand by citizens for e‐government, the digital divide, and political factors influenced the level of e‐participation.

The results of this study imply that governments should do more to stimulate demand for e‐government, address issues of the digital divide, and provide for more open and transparent government. A limitation of this study is its focus on e‐participation through a survey instrument, which does not consider all possible forms of e‐participation.

For e‐participation to blossom, governments should do more to promote citizens' demand for e‐government, bridge the digital divide, and promote more open and transparent government.

Existing research on e‐participation has focused on theory building and case studies; this paper provides empirical evidence, through a survey, of the level of e‐participation and factors that promote e‐participation.