The effects of internal characteristics of municipal government agencies and environmental factors of municipalities on the scope and the quality of municipal e-government initiatives developing an integrated approach /

by Pavlichev, Alexei.

PAVLICHEV, ALEXEI. The effects of internal characteristics of municipal government agencies and environmental factors of municipalities on the scope and the quality of municipal e-government initiatives: Developing an integrated approach. (Under the direction of G. David Garson.) The objective of the research has been to determine which internal characteristics of municipal government agencies and which environmental factors of the municipalities across the U.S. affect the quality and the scope of adoption of municipal electronic government (egovernment) initiatives. To accomplish this objective, an integrated approach was developed. The approach combined theoretical methodologies of three frameworks applied to the public sector agencies: innovation theory, information and communication technology, and e-government. It was hypothesized that theoretical premises of these frameworks complement each other in their ability to explain municipal e-government initiatives and their combination would help to address the drawbacks that characterize the present research on municipal e-government. The dependent variable in the present research is municipal e- government score. The dependent variable measures the scope and quality of municipal e- government initiatives. The research concentrates on two sets of predictor variables: internal municipal government agency characteristics and external environmental factors of municipalities. Correlation/regression analyses were performed to explore bivariate and multivariate relationships between the dependent and predictor variables and to accomplish the following goals: (1) describe the relationship between the dependent variable and the two sets of predictors (internal municipal agency characteristics and external environmental factors); (2) determine the effects of individual predictors in explaining the rate and the scope of adoption of e-government initiatives; and (3) compare the two sets of predictors in their power to explain the rate and the scope of adoption of e-government initiatives. The results of these analyses demonstrated that external environmental factors are significantly better predictors of the quality and the scope of local e-government initiatives, as measured by the e-government score, both individually and as a set.