Building Accountability in e-government Services: Inputs for Policy

Abstract

Governments worldwide are investing many resources in developing digital government infrastructure and networks. Government webpages and supersites are substituting for their brick-and-mortar offices and physical state-citizen communication. This shift is transforming the administration and the process of digital government. We also see a growing push for expanding the role of citizens as participants and co-creators of policy and programs for establishing a collaborative digital government. This study examines the Indian e-government setup to explain how governments can ensure ‘accountability by policy design,’ or Digital Accountability (DA), on e-government service (eGS) websites. A mixed-method research design is used to uncover the critical design factors that can help build and maintain accountability on any government service (eGS hereafter) website. Our results show that Transparency remains the most important dimension, but concerns about security and privacy have also become foundational to the conceptualisation of accountability. Another important finding shows that building accountability is meaningful only if there is responsiveness and a sense of user control over the services. The findings also establish an explicit requirement to establish liability for service quality and effectively enforce a sense of accountability in modern eGS. We believe our findings can help improve the theoretical understanding of accountability in eGS while providing actionable insights to practitioners and policymakers to ensure accountable services in the digital age