This paper asserts that e-government works, in principle, in the utilitarian mode of information technology use rather than solidary and participatory modes. E-government stakeholders visit government Web sites to pursue material incentives and rarely expect interactions and edemocracy there although senior/executive managers tout transformational and participatory egovernment symbolically and/or ostensibly for their political gain. The notion of transformational e-government is almost rhetoric and has a reversed causal relationship that egovernment reforms government. Government reflects or shapes e-government. Due to the administrative neutrality, e-democracy is not likely or its effect will not be significant. Participation in the policy processes will be plausible when motivated and qualified users and civil servants/managers are available. In general, e-government itself is not transformational and participatory, but rather instrumental to get utilitarian incentives.

This study explores the impact of campaign web sites on electoral civic engagement by examining 2004 Internet Tracking Survey data. Propensity score matching and the recursive bivariate probit model are employed to deal with endogeneity and the missing data problem, which are often ignored in existing literature. Findings show that effects of campaign web sites vary across individual engagements and generally support reinforcement theory rather than mobilization theory.

The latter 20th and beginning of the 21st century have ushered in new forms of governance, opening the gates to what has been variously described as a “new public service,” a “multisectored public service,” and a “state of agents.” As government authority is dispersed, we increasingly rely on these new public servants for service delivery and policy implementation. But who are now the agents of the state? How might the changed makeup of a new public service alter our expectations about democratic governance? The questions we investigate in this study are, first, now that the public sector has been transformed, what are the characteristics of the agents of the new governance? And are the new public servants, in the words of Charles Goodsell, “ordinary people”? We use the General Social Survey to shed light on our focal question. Our results suggest that public servants in for-profit settings resemble traditional civil servants in many ways. The growing ranks of social, health, and education public servants in nonprofit settings are distinct in many ways from civil servants and for-profit public servants. Implications of the changing composition of the public sector in an era of transformed governance are discussed.

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