The Impacts of Information Technology on Public Administration: An Analysis of Empirical Research from the “Golden Age” of Transformation
Author(s)
Anderson, Kim Viborg; Danziger, James N.
Abstract
Our primary goal in this article is to advance our knowledge about the impacts of IT (Information Technology) on the political system, and particularly on public administration. In many discussions of these impacts, there is still a tendency to emphasize either an utopian pattern based on an idealization of the positive benefits that IT will bring to citizens, public administrators, and politicians or an Orwellian vision in which the effects of ITs are generally undemocratic, inequitable and dehumanizing. This article provides a systematic, empirical examination of the impacts of IT in the domains of politics and public administration. We explore the extent to which the major transformations attributed to IT have occurred during what we call the “golden age” of IT (from the late 1980s until the turn of the century) — a period of rapid expansion of IT investment and the routinization of the technology into behavior and practice of all types of actors and organizations.
