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Published . by Mary C. Greathouse. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public's perceptions of government's performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different types of decentralization, including fiscal decentralization, administrative decentralization, federalism, and aggregate decentralization. Our results show that fiscal and administrative decentralization are qualitatively alike in that greater decentralization in each case improves perceptions of the government performance. Federalist states' performance and overall decentralization are viewed somewhat differently. With regard to tax administration particularly, fiscal and administrative forms of government decentralization result in better outcomes than overall decentralization. Finally, service industries and large firms, ceteris paribus, perceived government performance differently.

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 mobile technologies increases, the public sector is constantly innovating to keep pace with the changing technologies and citizens' expectations. This essay reviews the academic literature on e-government among local governments and explores the issues related to its adoption and implementation. Adopting an e-government stages perspective with attention to institutional capacity, the essay examines the factors and determinants of local e-government success. The essay concludes with directions for future research on e-government and innovation in local governments.

"Electronic government, or, in short e-government, can contribute significantly to strengthening the efficiency, productivity, and transparency of government institutions. However, the potentials of the new information and communication technologies (ICT) are not always so easy to translate into practice. Rapid successes can be achieved above all in cases where a solid institutional base is already in place and good expert and infrastructural resources are
available – a set of conditions not given in many developing countries. The aim of e-government is to open up new internal and external communications channels, to simplify administrative
procedures, to improve the accessibility of public actors and services, and to enhance access to information. This often also means that these new technologies are vehicles of democratic, customer-oriented, and decentralized models of political decision-making and public administration. If these models are to be translated into practice, reforms must be embedded in an overall concept that takes account of both customer and target-group demand and the
challenges posed by internal administrative cooperation and networking. In the foreseeable future it will be mainly industrialized and advanced developing countries that are in a position to
draft and implement comprehensive strategies of this kind. But potential uses are also opening up for poorer countries. The obstacles to modernization of government institutions must often be sought less in financial or infrastructural bottlenecks than in blockades in the political sphere.
Development cooperation (DC) can use e-government as a means of supporting partner countries in devising and implementing political and administrative reforms and in improving market-oriented frameworks. Beyond the immediate benefits of the new technologies, e-government should be taken as an instrument to promote good governance and to strengthen reform-oriented actors in politics and civil society." (author's abstract)

Paper presented at ICT conference of 2007. Theme : Managing and Measuring ICT in Business and Education ; Paper presented at ICT conference of 2007. Theme : Managing and Measuring ICT in Business and Education

President Trump has been accused of using @realDonaldTrump to troll his critics. While the President's tweets are often attributed to his personal views, they raise important Constitutional questions. This article posits that @realDonaldTrump tweets are government speech and, where they troll government critics, they violate the Free Speech Clause. I begin the article with an exploration of President Trump's use of @realDonaldTrump from his time as a private citizen to President. The article then chronicles the development of the government speech doctrine and the Supreme Court's factors that differentiate private speech from government speech. I argue that, based on the factors in Walker v. Tex. Div., Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., @realDonaldTrump is government speech. After concluding the President's tweets are government speech, the article moves to a less developed issue in the Court's jurisprudence— whether the Constitution places limits on what the government may say. The Court has determined that the First Amendment has no bearing on the government's freedom to choose what views it propounds. Still the Court has intimated that other Constitutional principles may act to restrain the government's speech. I suggest that although the First Amendment does not prohibit the government from choosing among a variety of viewpoints, it restrains the government's speech in other ways. I argue that, because the government may not interfere with an individual's freedom of speech, the government violates its critics' Free Speech Clause rights when it trolls them in an effort to dissuade them from speaking.

This paper provides a dynamic theory of a parliamentary government system with proportional-representation elections, policy-motivated parties and voters, and an endogenous status-quo policy. The theory identifies the representation of parties in parliament, the governments the parties form, the policies chosen by those governments, and the duration of the governments and their policies. Governments are majoritarian, government parties are equal partners, they and their policies are durable, voters elect minority parliaments in every period, and government policies provide concessions to centrist voters. If crises can occur, governments can fall, but a new government forms after the next election. The theory provides explanations for three empirical findings: equilibria consistent with Gamson's law, an analog of Duverger's law for proportional-representation electoral systems, and compensational voting where voters give the out party additional votes when an incumbent government is expected to continue in office.