Two decades of e-government diffusion among local governments in the United States

This study is the first to evaluate e-government diffusion among local governments in the United States over time. The diffusion rates of various types of e-government services are measured and analyzed over two decades. E-government surveys conducted by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) from 2000 to 2011 provide an early trendline of e-government services offered, and an original two-wave panel survey was conducted in 2014 and 2019 collecting data, which extends this timeline and offers new ways to measure adoption in this later period. The panel survey includes the same 83 cities randomly selected from all cities with populations over 50,000, representing over 10% of medium and large size cities in the U.S.The findings of this study provide a clear picture that cities across the nation have increasingly adopted a wide set of e-gov services, with some reaching near complete diffusion. A total of 45 different e-government services are evaluated, with similar e-government services organized together into informational, interactive, multimedia, financial, and social media scaled variables for further analysis. Adoption and diffusion of e-government services have been neither steady nor uniform. However, from 2014 to 2019 the trend was clear: more cities offered more e-government services more consistently.The findings also offer insights into the characteristics of cities that have adopted e-government innovations earlier than others. Both greater population size and percent of residents with broadband access contribute in a statistically significant way to the number of e-gov services adopted, while other expected independent variables like economic measures of wealth do not. These findings contribute to a broader conversation about how the diffusion of e-government service adoption has changed over time and the extent to which that has affected the relationship between residents and their local governments throughout the first two decades of the 21st Century.