Alex Ingrams

Leiden University | LEI · Institute of Public Administration

What the Open Government Partnership tells us about how international initiatives can and do shape domestic public sector reform. At the 2011 meeting of the UN General Assembly, the governments of eight nations—Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States—launched the Open Government Partne...

Scholars still have a mixed picture of the impact of online public involvement in regulatory policy making, and a shortage of theoretical explanations. The novel theory put forward in this article is that substantive, technical and political factors combined can help explain the degree of success public involvement will have in shaping proposed rul...

Pricing of public goods is particularly challenging for public services that are strongly rights-based in character. Such is the case of freedom of information requesting procedures. Costs have implications for how citizens will treat requesting procedures as well as how their views and attitudes towards procedures will be affected. This study exam...

During the last decade, a new approach to bureaucratic reform in the field of public administration, open government, has aimed to increase government transparency and accountability and improve participation of citizens and other stakeholders of government. In the current era of digital governance transformations, evaluating governmental efforts t...

The adoption of artificial intelligence in the public sector has generated a lively academic and policy debate about what sort of transparency is needed to govern AI systems. This chapter explores the background to this debate. It explains what transparency means and why it is expected of public organizations. The chapter further highlights the big...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

en Using a survey experiment on the topic of tax auditing, we investigate artificial intelligence (AI) use in government decision making through the lenses of citizen red tape and trust. We find that individuals consider an AI-led decision to be lower in red tape and trustworthiness than a decision by a human. We also find that highly complex tasks...

How does membership in transnational multistakeholder institutions shape states' domestic governance? We complement traditional compliance‐based approaches by developing a process model, focusing on the independent effects of processes associated with institutional membership, but separate from commitments and compliance themselves. These effects c...

In this paper, the author argues that the conflict between the copious amount of digital data processed by public organisations and the need for policy-relevant insights to aid public participation constitutes a ‘public information paradox’. Machine learning (ML) approaches may offer one solution to this paradox through algorithms that transparentl...

Red tape is a salient societal problem but there is a dearth of research on how perceived red tape can be reduced. Building on the transparency literature, we hypothesize that higher levels of rationale and process transparency will result in lower levels of perceived red tape. We test our reasoning using a survey experiment. Specifically, we have...

The open government paradigm implies public processes are becoming more transparent, public information is available online, and citizens and non‐governmental organizations are encouraged to interact with public administration through new platform‐based forms of participation and collaboration. Though these governmental efforts to open up organizat...

A growing stream of research in public administration is concerned with how red tape and administrative burden affects citizens. Drawing on the procedural fairness literature, we argue that the consistent application of rules reduces perceived red tape. We also hypothesize that red tape perceptions are affected by outcome favorability and that an i...

As the rate of global technological change becomes ever more visible, the development of e-governance is sometimes taken for granted as a path-dependent process. E-governance evolution models assume that the quality of online government information, services, and transactions, will trend ever upward. This article tests this claim through a global a...

Existing research shows that open government can result in better governance outcomes. However, there remains a gap in our understanding of how open government’s two component dimensions of transparency and participation – “vision” and “voice” – affect governance outcomes, and how they relate to each other within public decision-making. We use a su...

In public administration today, many new reform ideas mingle, offering new diagnoses of governmental problems and courses of action. But scholars have highlighted reasons why we should doubt the optimistic claims of reformists. A new set of policy tools called “open government” arrived nearly a decade ago, and scholars have not yet explained its or...

This article presents a systematic literature review of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the public sector. The findings show that although OCB is gaining more attention in the public sector, research often does not take specific public sector characteristics or concepts into account. Based on the available evidence, the authors develop...

Scholars and policymakers claim open government offers a panoply of good governance benefits, but it also risks political abuse as window dressing or a smokescreen. To address this risk, this article builds on the meaning of openness through an examination of closed and open society in Karl Popper’s theory. Four historic trends in open government r...

Municipalities ostensibly scale the ladder of e‐participation improvement to gain legitimacy. However, research has not yet addressed how e‐participation initiatives are affected by serious legitimacy concerns such as corruption. One municipal response to corruption is to use e‐participation offerings as a remedial effort to gain citizen trust, but...

en Big data applications have been acclaimed as potentially transformative for the public sector. But, despite this acclaim, most theory of big data is narrowly focused around technocratic goals. The conceptual frameworks that situate big data within democratic governance systems recognizing the role of citizens are still missing. This paper explor...

This article explores an organizational design perspective of open government. A conceptual model is developed of how contingency factors, design parameters, and goals fit together in an open government organization based on two case studies in the United Kingdom and the United States. The cases are compared, and the unique and common organizationa...

Public administration scholars have so far largely viewed big data as a kind of technocratic transformation. However, through citizens’ digital records, use of service apps, social media, digital sensors, and other digital footprints, big data also gives policymakers insights into citizen choices and is therefore potentially supportive of public va...

JULY 4, 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 Freedom of Information Act of the United States. Freedom of Information (FOI) has become a vital element of the American political process, become recognized as a core value of democracy, and helped to inspire similar laws and movements around the world. FOI has always faced myriad challenges...

Scholarly knowledge of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has developed significantly in the private and public sectors. However, comparisons between sectors have not been advanced. This article aims to address the gap with hierarchical linear modeling of OCB antecedents across sectors, accounting for individual- and sector-level differences...

Global e-government innovations are at the forefront of municipal efforts to be better organized and more efficient in delivering services and improving outcomes for the public. Scholars have argued that such innovations are embedded in institutional and environmental factors, and municipal e-government growth evolves through stages as a result of...

The connection between democracy and transparency would appear to be strong. Democratic countries have been among the earliest adopters of new legislation in transparency reforms such as access to information (ATI) laws. However, research has not yet tested the connection in the context of democratic reform where transitioning countries have the op...

The Barack Obama administration advanced open government initiatives to make federal administration more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Yet a question remains whether federal administrators took notice. This article examines changes in the extent to which U.S. federal agencies have integrated the three core principles of open govern...

Over the past two decades, governments have used information and communication technologies (ICTs) to integrate their internal functions and improve their delivery of services. Scholars and practitioners have conceptualized these various ICT trends and referred to them collectively as e-government. As the number of citizens using the Internet and m...

Government transparency continues to challenge existing frameworks for understanding organizational performance. Transparency has proven difficult to measure and results assessing its impacts are mixed. This article sets forward a model of performance-based accountability in open government initiatives. Data come from the Open Government Partnershi...

In the United States, there is mounting political pressure on public agencies to publish internal data. But transparency policy innovation brings a unique set of legal and normative challenges regarding how sensitive information will be used. It is therefore an open question as to what legal-normative conditions favour innovation. Are there specifi...

Open government reform is frequently being used to promote greater transparency and participation in government. But conceptual models of transparency success have not been well articulated, and there is a puzzle regarding whether and why transparency policies perform. One way forward is to assess negative cases of when open government initiatives...

Purpose This paper aims to analyse extant literature on open data, distinguish and categorize the strands of public accountability research and use the results to provide better clarity in the concept of open data-driven public accountability. Design/methodology/approach Systematic review of 135 open data articles and 155 accountability articles f...

Public organisations are often described as being subject to types of complexity that result from the interorganisational structure of governance networks. Transparency programmes add another level of complexity due to increased information openness. However, neither the nature of this complexity nor the network management approaches needed for tra...

Scholars continue to debate how information and communications technology (ICT) influences civic behavior. Existing studies may be grouped into two approaches: ICT as a tool used to achieve a civic end, and ICT as an unanticipated influencer of how citizens view civic roles. This paper develops the second theory by testing moderated relationships b...

Open government is a growing feature of public administration in governments across the globe. Open government has long been considered vital to democratic society but, with the arrival of digital government, openness has become touted by governments that use information and communication technologies (ICT) without making the necessary legal and in...

This study assesses open government performance through three public administration perspectives - efficiency, democratic responsiveness, and legal-rational perspectives.

This paper lays out an analytical framework for OG policy design processes. It uses a systematic review of (1) scholarly literature, and (2) real OG policies to corroborate existing definitions of OG and its sub-categories. The sub-categories are then used for an in-depth literature review of policy design research that is developed into a conceptu...

en Related Content: Balfour and Newbold (PAR November/December 2016) Related Content: King (PAR November/December 2016) Related Content: Fiorino (PAR November/December 2016) Related Content: Knox (PAR November/December 2016) Related Content: Brook (PAR November/December 2016)

International student enrollment in public service degrees such as Public Administration in the United States has grown rapidly. Harnessing this growth to improve the knowledge and expertise of employees in public service is a vital opportunity. However, our survey of public service schools shows that international students perceive an extensive la...

A key objective of open government programs is to promote public accountability by using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to release data on the internal working of public agencies. However, it is not clear how actual accountability (such as sanctions or rewards) may be achieved from the data disclosed. Nor it is clear how ICT in ge...

Information and communication technology (ICT) use in e-governance has grown in significance for contemporary scholarship on government administration and civic engagement. But the unique contribution of types of mobile phone devices has not been well distinguished in the overall relevance of ICT. This paper makes a theoretical and empirical case f...