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Abstract
This article examines how elected officials' interactions with neighborhood groups, business interests, issue groups, and other stakeholders are shaped by their use of the Internet and by characteristics of local e-government infrastructure. The study utilizes data from a nationwide survey of local elected officials and from an analysis of corresponding local government websites. Results show that Internet use is associated with a significant increase in contact with stakeholders and with increasingly diverse types of communication partners, even after controlling for officials' general propensity to communicate. Both time spent on official duties and city size moderate the influence of Internet use. However, local government web sites do not appear to have a substantive influence on citizen's participation in policy making.
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Notes
We used Hayes and Krippendorff's (Citation2007) SPSS macro to compute this reliability estimate.
Detailed information about the construction of all measures is available from the first author upon request.
We treat elected officials as independent throughout our analysis, using OLS regression instead of multi-level models. We recognize the problems that this could produce, but find no evidence of differences in stakeholder interactions between cities when evaluating random effects using either Wald or likelihood ratio tests (see Hayes Citation2006). The lack of systemic variation on the outcome variable at the city level justifies treating the cases as independent.