Previous Studies
E-government observers can be divided into at least three camps,
depending on how they view this phenomenon (Norris 2001). First,
there are the cyber-optimists, who generally believe uncritically that
only good things will come from e-government. Th en there are the
cyber-pessimists, who, in a mirror image of the cyber-optimists,
believe that all things “e” can only produce negative results. In
between are the cyber-realists, who (in the words of Harry Truman’s
fi ctional economist) might say that, on the one hand, e-government
will be a good thing but, on the other, it will be a bad thing.
Many, if not most, of the early writers on the subject of e-government
fell into the cyber-optimist camp. Cyber-optimists
were particularly well represented among the relatively few but
nevertheless infl uential scholars who penned the early normative
models of e-government (i.e., Baum and Di Maio 2000;
Hiller and Bélanger 2001; Layne and Lee 2001; Ronaghan 2002;
Wescott 2001). Among other things, these models claimed that
e-government would evolve naturally through several steps or
phases, moving from the provision of basic information and
services to transactions, interaction, “joined-up government” (the
horizontal and vertical integration of information and service
provision within and among governments), to e-transformation
and e-democracy.
Th ese models and other cyber-optimist works have had considerable
infl uence within the fi eld of e-government research, and many
works published since then continue to promote an optimistic view
of e-government. Here are but a few examples: