Communication and dialogue: what government websites might tell us about citizenship and governance

Abstract

There are many ways to map and measure the links and spaces between the citizen and government. With the new models of governance available—where the government directs and the private sector along with a range of other actors implements—there are a whole number of questions that can be both examined in a qualitative manner but also may be examined in a quantitative manner. This paper looks at one quantitative approach (WAES—Website Attribute Evaluation System) and posit that it may be possible to develop from this further techniques—the development of e‐metrics—which will aid qualitative study of the citizenship and governance in the world of e‐government (E‐Gov).

Notes

Correspondence: Philip Leith and John Morison, School of Law, Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. E‐mail: [email protected] and [email protected].

Paper presented at IVR, Lund, 2003.

Of course, the theorist who philosophers of law would suggest as being most interested in ‘law in action’ is Herbert Hart. It is felt that this view is not sustainable—he was certainly not doing sociology in his search for common usage. See P Leith and P Ingram The Jurisprudence of Orthodoxy Routledge, 1988. Hart's successor at Oxford, John Gardner, follows on the path of triviality laid out by Hart, giving the usual low‐level examples—‘Many legal arguments are a lot more complex than this’, he says in ‘The legality of law’ Associations Vol 7, No 1, 2003, pp 89–101. It might be suggested that all legal arguments are very much more complex than the examples he gives.

For example, Lars Lindahl ‘Operative and justificatory grounds in legal argumentation’ Associations Vol 7 No 1 2003, pp 185–200, looks (in a somewhat pointless task) for foundationalism in the logic of modus ponens. It seems clear and trivial that the structural form in which the argument is presented is intimately connected with what one wishes to present. See final chapters of our The Barrister's World and the Nature of Law Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1992, for views of the construction of legal arguments.

The legal logician's view rarely seems to relate to law in practice as the judge finds it—the exemplars used are always trivial and rarely timely and to do with debate in law. The legal logician's view is also rarely related to the interests of the professional mathematical logician—it seems to owe more to logos than today's logic. The legal logician's view is almost always individual, yet claiming wide‐ranging benefits as against all the other individualistic logics. The problem, of course, is formalism. See P Leith Formalism in AI and Computer Science Ellis Horwood, 1990, for critical views of legal logic and it's impact upon research in law and computing.

CM 4310 1999, HMSO, London.

Para. 11.

The Green Paper Reform of Social Security, 1985.

See, for example, R Geary and P Leith ‘Law in a “Changing Technological Society” ’ in S Livingstone and J Morison (ed) Law Society and Change Dartmouth, Brookfield, Vt. 1990 and ‘From operational strategy to serving the customer: technology and ethics in welfare law’ International Review of Law Computers and Technology Vol 15, No 2, 2001, pp 213–228. This, one might have thought, would have been of interest to legal philosophers—investigating how technology relates to the morality of law.

White Paper, ‘Modernising Government’ HMSO, London, 1999, chap 5, para 5.

For recent work on the now familiar idea of governance, see M Bevir and R A W Rhodes, Interpreting British Governance, Routledge, London, 2003 and the Special Issue of Public Administration Vol 81, 2003.

For example, see further generally R Blaug ‘New theories of discursive democracy: a user’s guide' Philosophy and Social Criticism Vol 22, 1996, p 49; M Saward ‘Reconstructing democracy: current thinking and new directions’ Government and Opposition Vol 36, No 4, p 559, 2001; and A Fung and E Olin Wright ‘Deepening democracy: innovations in empowered participatory governance’ Politics and Society Vol 29, pp 5–41, 2001, pp 5–41.

In financial terms alone this is startling. The Economist (4 May 2002) details the record of e‐government failures which include the computerization of Passport Office which resulted in increased delays and added £40 million, projects within the Inland Revenue where costs doubled adding an additional £1.4 billion and the Home Office scheme to computerize aspects of immigration applications, which was abandoned after costing £77 million. The examples could be multiplied. There is an estimate that the total cost of cancelled and over‐budget government IT schemes exceeds £1.5 billion in the last six years. See further Computing March 2003.

See for example the large numbers of attempts in the 1980s to produce ‘legal expert systems’. The general view is that the attempt was doomed to fail through a lack of understanding of the nature of law.

See Leith, Formalism in AI op cit, Ref 3.

See further M Castells ‘La era de la información’ Alianza, Madrid Vol 1, p 122, 1996.

See further J Morison (Spring 2003) ‘Online government and e‐constitutionalism’ Public Law p 14–23.

Cyberspace Policy Research Group at www.cyprg.arizona.edu. Unfortunately, the Group does not appear to be active. It was influential and produced a number of policy papers, but it has not been possible to make contact with members of the group.

CC Demchak, C Friis, TM La Porte, ‘Webbing Governance: National Differences in Constructing the Face of Public Organisations’, in G David Garson (ed) Handbook of Public Information Systems, Marcel Dekker Publishers, New York 2000.

For example the SOCITM and IDEA Local E‐Government Now: A World Wide View report produced in 2002 characterizes e‐government development as falling into three broad categories: ‘e‐services’, concerned with securing and providing government services by electronic means; ‘e‐governance’, concerned with linking up citizens stakeholders and elected representatives to participate in the governance of communities; and ‘e‐knowledge’ where the emphasis is on CM 4310 1999 developing the skills and ICT infrastructure to exploit knowledge for competitive advantage.

M Foucalt ‘Two lectures’ in C Gordon (ed) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Harvester, Wheatsheaf, London, 1980. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from French by Alan Sheridan, Allen Lane, London 1977.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Morison

Correspondence: Philip Leith and John Morison, School of Law, Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. E‐mail: [email protected] and [email protected]. Paper presented at IVR, Lund, 2003.