The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities

GOVINF-01036; No. of pages: 7; 4C: Government Information Quarterly xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities Yueping Zheng a, Hindy Lauer Schachter b,⁎, Marc Holzer c a b c

School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA School of Management, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online xxxx Keywords: Government structure e-Participation Municipalities New Jersey

a b s t r a c t During the past two decades, governments have started to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to offer a new forum for citizen involvement known as e-participation. The rapid development of e-participation has been attracting attention from many researchers. While a growing body of research has explored various factors impacting e-participation, few studies have examined the influence of government structures on the e-participation opportunities that jurisdictions offer users. To fill the research gap and begin investigating this relationship, we use data from 97 New Jersey municipalities to analyze the impact on e-participation of three local government structures: mayor-council, council-manager, and township. The results show that municipalities with the mayor-council form of government are more likely to have higher levels of e-participation offerings. We argue that the role of an elected executive in this structure facilitates the will to provide greater opportunities for citizens to participate online. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction This study explores the impact of municipal government form on the e-participation opportunities local jurisdictions offer. The intent of the article is to use a survey of New Jersey governments to investigate the role of structure on e-participation opportunities. During the past 25 years, governments have expanded electronic delivery of information and services. Although efficient service delivery rather than dialogue remains the primary focus of governmental website design, some jurisdictions also use information and communication technology (ICT) as a mechanism to involve citizens in policy development (Roman & Miller, 2013). This extension of ICT into citizen involvement is alternatively called e-participation, e-democracy, e-governance, or e-government (Sæbø et al., 2008). The rise of municipal websites has generally developed incrementally rather than in a transformative manner (Norris & Reddick, 2013). With the development of new technologies that permit an increasingly broad array of e-participation activities, governmental actors in each jurisdiction have had to decide which forums to adopt. The decisions governments make will have significant impacts on the roles and responsibilities of citizens and the ability of IT to reinvent democratic governance (Kakabadze, Kakabadze, & Kouzmin, 2003). Yet, vast

⁎ Corresponding author at: 420 E. 64 St., New York, NY USA 10065.

differences exist in the menu of participation-oriented activities individual jurisdictions provide. As we will discuss later in the literature review, governmental structure is one factor that may influence which activities a jurisdiction offers. It is one factor in whether and to what extent a jurisdiction provides interactive participation opportunities as well as information and service delivery, at a time when some analysts consider such use of IT necessary to engage residents (e.g., Barnes & Williams, 2012). At the local level in America, a key structural difference emanates from the political status of the chief executive. American municipalities often have a choice between using the mayor-council and councilmanager structures, as well as other possible arrangements. In the mayor-council system, citizens elect both the chief executive and the legislators, thus politicizing both roles; in the council-manager system, citizens only elect legislators who then appoint a professional manager. Both forms have adherents. An Moulder (2008) survey found that 34% of cities with 2500 or more residents used the mayor-council form and 55% used the council-manager arrangement. But their rationales are at odds. The council-manager form assumes that local governments should provide apolitical, administrative services. This rationale separates policy making, which is the council's function, from implementation; technical expertise rather than political approval determines who should appoint department heads and hold them responsible for the operation of the city (Basehart, Kane, Wagenhals, & Hedger, 2000). Mayor-council governments, on the other hand, assume that the chief executive who formulates budgets, recommends policies,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.06.004 0740-624X/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Zheng, Y., et al., The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities, Government Information Quarterly (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.06.004

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Y. Zheng et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

and takes responsibilities for the everyday operation of the government needs to be a political figure. The purpose of this research is to use a survey of New Jersey governments to investigate the role of structural difference on the eparticipation opportunities which jurisdictions offer users. The importance of the analysis lies in its help to answer the question: which attributes of governments facilitate using IT to foster citizen engagement? The study will investigate the influence of three types of structures: mayor-council, council-manager, and township. As we will explain later in the data and measurement section, New Jersey law allows local governments a choice of municipal structure. While large New Jersey jurisdictions tend to use the nationally ubiquitous mayor-council or council-manager forms, some smaller governments use a number of other structures, including, the Township, an intermediate form. In this form, voters elect a Township Committee of three or five persons as their legislature; this committee then elects a mayor for a 1-year term (New Jersey State League of Municipalities, 2013). These three forms produce governments with different internal distributions of authority and responsibility. Executives with variant bases for their authority may favor different approaches for obtaining citizen feedback on public issues. As these executives and their subordinates are the individuals who authorize and develop website participation initiatives, such variance in executive preference could impact government provision of e-participation opportunities. This article proceeds in six sections. The first section reviews some literature on the role of municipal structure in conventional participation settings, with an emphasis on the influence of council-manager and mayor-council structures. The next section reviews literature on a variety of variables that seem to impact e-participation opportunities. The third section discusses the Rutgers survey of New Jersey governments and describes how we measure the variables in our model. The fourth section presents the empirical findings. The final two sections present discussion and conclusions, respectively.

2. Government form and citizen participation How best to involve citizens in government decision processes has been a longstanding research concern of public administration and political science scholars. A vast body of literature explores the factors that influence the opportunities governments offer citizen for participation and the responses of citizens to these opportunities. Some research emphasizes the demographic characteristics of the participants (Boschken, 1992, 1994; Franklin, 2001; Franklin & Ebdon, 2005); some focuses on their preferences and willingness (Franklin & Ebdon, 2005; Glaser & Hildreth, 1996; Wilson, 1983); and some examines the mechanisms used to gather citizen input (Bryson, 1995; Franklin & Ebdon, 2005; Simonsen & Robbins, 2000). Franklin and Ebdon (2005) argue that four groups of factors may influence effectiveness: city structure, types of participants, mechanisms used to foster participation, and the process itself. No scholarly consensus exists on the impact of structure on traditional participation opportunities. Sharp (2012, p. 125) sums up one strand in the political science literature when she argued that the “so-called reformed institutions of government, such as at-large elections, the council-manager plan, and nonpartisanship, have long been viewed as depoliticizing features of local government; and part of depoliticizing means a lowering of citizen interest in politics and local elections.” She based this conclusion in part on Hajnal and Lewih (2003) finding that the more politicized mayor-council form of government yields higher election turnouts than councilmanager governments, even when controls for various demographic factors are taken into account. Wood's (2002) research of cities with 25,000 or greater population also found higher turnout in mayorcouncil cities; he attributed this disparity to those cities having one accountable figure whom voters knew to credit or blame. Yang and Callahan (2007) found that the council-manager structure had

a negative impact on governmental use of citizen input in strategic decisions. However, a smaller body of research argues for the importance of the city manager's professional expertise in fostering traditional participation. Based on data gathered from open-ended survey questions, correspondence, and in-depth panel discussions, Nalbandian (1999, p. 1) maintained that managers were expected to facilitate participation as part of their role “as community builders and enablers of democracy.” Franklin and Ebdon (2005) compared Burlington, Iowa (a council-manager city), and Topeka, Kansas (a mayor-council city), as to citizen participation in budget construction. They found that Burlington encouraged involvement with two call-in periods for citizen comments, while Topeka had little opportunity for two-way interaction for those people who lacked partisan connections. Complicating the research landscape, Wang's (2001) survey data from 249 chief administrative officers in U.S. cities with population greater than 50,000 showed no significant citizen participation difference between these two forms of governments. In this research, the differences between council-manager and mayor-council governments were not significant in terms of participation mechanisms, the functions of participation, and the role of citizens in decision-making. Unfortunately, none of these studies yields a definitive role for structural influence on citizen participation opportunities, especially the new form of citizen participation online—e-participation. Insufficient research exists to test the impact of government form on e-participation offering level. Most of the political science literature restricts its focus to voting where mayor-council structures are superior, but this analysis says little about other forums. As Zhang and Yang (2009) noted, Ebdon and Franklin based their results on case studies of participation in one functional area, budgeting. This limitation makes it difficult to generalize their findings to other jurisdictions or functions. Although Wang's study used quantitative methods, he limited himself to the traditional forums popular in the 1990s such as public hearings, citizen advisory boards, community meetings, individual citizen representatives, and citizen focus groups, rather than investigating current e-participation forums such as citizens' directly contacting government officials online, completing online surveys, expressing opinions on online discussion boards, or participating in e-meetings. This change in the universe of participation forums makes it reasonable to test Wang's conclusion again. More problematically, no consensus exists on some of the underlying theoretical assumptions that support some of this research. While Kweit and Kweit (1981) and Nalbandian (1999) have posited that professional expertise will lead managers to want involvement, a number of other commentators have argued that professionalism subverts democracy in the public sphere (Adams, 1992; Lee, 1995). This latter view would support the primacy of mayor-council systems, with politically chosen executives, to promote participation. Some recent commentators question whether the issue of structure can be solved with a simple “yes/no” answer, labeling one structure the winner in all participation scenarios. Zhang and Yang (see also Yang & Callahan, 2005) argued that the impact of the council-manager form depends on the dimensions of citizen involvement (p. 292). Even if council-manager governments are more likely to adopt involvement mechanisms such as public hearings, community meetings, and citizen surveys as Ebdon and Franklin proposed, this does not necessarily mean that they will enable more citizen involvement in strategic decision making, management, and service delivery. In Zhang and Yang's argument, the impact of council-manager form on citizen participation is complex, with many factors involved. Liao and Zhang (2012) make a similar argument. For them, the role of the council-manager form is complex because many factors impact citizen participation in a given system such as the “relationship between elected officials and city managers, utilization of participatory mechanisms, city manager's motivation to incorporate citizens and the level of citizen participation in local budgeting” (Liao & Zhang, 2011, p.3).

Please cite this article as: Zheng, Y., et al., The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities, Government Information Quarterly (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.06.004

Y. Zheng et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

3. e-Participation and e-participation studies Diverse research exists on e-participation. Using conventional literature review techniques, Sæbø et al. (2008) and Medaglia (2012) identified the articles considered important for theoretical development in eparticipation and found that these articles covered several areas. Studies encompass actors (citizens, politicians, government institutions and officials, and voluntary organizations); activities (e-voting, online political discourse, online decision making, e-activism, e-consultation, ecampaigning, and e-petitioning); contextual factors (information availability, infrastructure, underlying technologies, accessibility, policy and legal issues, and governmental organization); effects on civic engagement, deliberation, and democracy, and their evaluation; and e-participation research methods (Medaglia, 2012; Sæbø et al., 2008). Research analyzing municipal websites has found that e-participation opportunities vary widely among jurisdictions (Carrizales, Holzer, Kim, & Kim, 2006). Such gaps appear in surveys of municipal websites with an American (Holzer, Manoharan, Shick, & Stowers, 2008), European (Torres, Pina, & Acerete, 2006), and global focus (Holzer & Kim, 2005). Differences also appear among national-level websites. A United Nations Department of Economic and Affairs (2012) survey gave websites from the Netherlands and the Republic of Korea high scores on their e-participation offerings, while 30 countries received scores of zero. The average score for developed countries in this survey was nearly 0.4, while that of the least developed countries was around 0.04. 3.1. Impact of political factors on e-participation An open question is why such great variances exist both at the local and national levels in providing opportunities or access for citizens to participate through websites. Medaglia (2012) noted that e-participation actors, including government institutions, develop participation activities in a particular context. Characteristics of the actor(s) responsible for development and the context are likely to influence the development process. Torres et al. (2006) examined the role of political culture and political will in developing citizen participation forums for large-city websites in Europe. They concluded that “the e-democracy dimension of e-government fits better into the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic public administration styles…because they are more concerned with customer needs than in the EU continental bureaucratic styles based on administrative law” (p. 292). They cited political will or its absence as the prevailing factor in explaining why a few continental cities such as Barcelona and Vienna got relatively good scores on e-participation surveys, while some Anglo-Saxon cities such as Belfast and Cardiff showed e-government scores below many continental jurisdictions. Other research has found a relationship between e-participation offerings and incumbent politician place on a left-right continuum. Using data from a survey of 113 municipal websites in Italy, Medaglia (2007) found that cities led by center-right parties adopted e-participation to a lesser extent than municipalities with a center-left orientation. Colombo (2010) tested the impact of the political party of the mayor on promoting e-participation offerings in Catalan local governments. He found that internet incorporation of participatory experiences was more favorable in municipalities where the mayor came from a party on the left. He also found that higher election participation rates correlated with more generous e-participation offerings. Through a case study, Sobaci (2010) explored the impact of political culture on how governments do or do not develop e-participation opportunities. By examining the content of Turkey's Grand National Assembly (TGNA)'s website, Sobaci (2010) found that the website did not allow citizens to contact officials by e-mail; nor did it offer online opinion polls or surveys To explain this phenomenon, Sobaci (2010) argued that the political and administrative cultures in Turkey were an obstacle to the establishment of more participatory mechanisms. In

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other words, Turkish political culture seems to be preventing the emergence of an atmosphere in which participatory mechanisms and democratic values are easily internalized by public-sector actors. Although these studies discuss the impact of several political factors on e-participation offerings, none explicitly analyze whether government form impacts government performance in providing access or opportunities for citizens to participate. This study aims at filling the research gap to some extent and exploring the impact of government form on e-participation offerings. Despite this lack of direct connection to our subject and the necessity of using caution in transposing findings from Europe to the United States, the findings of this literature are important for our direction in two ways. First, this literature suggests a role for political factors in influencing the extent to which a jurisdiction offers e-participation opportunities. The issue is clearly a matter of politics as well as technical capacity. Second, Colombo's (2010) finding that higher electoral participation correlates with greater e-participation offerings leads to a hypothesis that mayor-council systems should provide more extensive eparticipation offerings. Mayor-council systems tend to have higher electoral participation. 3.2. Contextual factors cannot be ignored Traditional and internet-based participation literatures suggest that several contextual factors may mediate the impact of government form on e-Participation: municipal size, transparency, finances, and eServices. A number of researchers have argued that larger cities are likely to have greater participation. Because they are more heterogeneous, such cities are likely to have increased inter-group political conflict, and therefore greater citizen desire to influence the government decision-making process (Ebdon & Franklin, 2006; Protasel, 1988). Medaglia's (2007) study of Italian websites found that those in large cities implemented greater e-participation offerings and suggested that this propensity emerged from a need to build a close relationship with citizens in a physically dispersed environment. However, Oliver (2000) concluded that citizen interest and social connection would mediate the impact of population size on citizen participation. If larger cities stimulated citizen interest and nourished a variety of sub-cultural social networks, then participation should increase with population size; if greater size produced alienation and social disconnection or made involvement more costly, then participation should decline with population gains. Piotrowski and Liao (2012) linked transparency and participation. In their perspective, transparency is not only about the quantity of information governments release but also about its usability—that is whether it is accurate, accessible, complete, understandable, timely, and free or low cost. They argued that the usability of information released through transparency mechanisms is vital for the scale and level of public participation. Their theory suggests that governments with higher transparency levels would be more likely to perform better in offering e-participation opportunities. Some evidence supporting this approach appeared in a study that found jurisdictions with greater budget transparency also had greater electoral turnout (Benito & Bastida, 2009). Meanwhile, some scholars also believe that “eParticipation initiatives result in increased transparency and openness of actors, policies, and processes” (Medaglia, 2011, p. 106). As implementing e-participation offerings requires physical and conceptual infrastructure (Kanstrup, Rose, & Torpe, 2006), a government's fiscal resources should impact the degree of e-participation development. In his research on Italian local-government websites, Medaglia (2007) found that extensive e-participation was more likely in municipalities with greater wealth. Greater financial resources made governments more likely to adopt and develop e-participation. This finding might suggest that municipalities with more employees—a greater number of human resources—would be more likely to develop e-participation opportunities.

Please cite this article as: Zheng, Y., et al., The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities, Government Information Quarterly (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.06.004

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Y. Zheng et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

Some public administration scholars argue that to make the services they provide fit public needs, government needs citizens to participate in the development process. Such citizen involvement allows people to explain their expectations and requirements (Crow & Stevens, 2012; Roberts, 2008). This perspective argues that superior policy outcomes are informed by the values, experiences, and priorities of the citizens who will be affected by implementation, leading to the assumption that those governments that provide better public services are more likely to be those whose jurisdictions emphasize greater citizen participation. In the context of e-government and e-participation, the theory suggests that governments providing better services online would be those whose websites also offer more developed e-participation opportunities. 4. New Jersey e-participation: Data and measurement This study of the impact of municipal form on e-participation offerings used local government data available in the 2012 New Jersey e-Governance Survey developed by the e-Governance Institute in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers-Newark. Numerous surveys of municipal websites have appeared in the last 15 years (see analyses by Baker, 2009; Berntzen & Olsen, 2009; Korsten & Bothma, 2005). However, these surveys paid more attention to website usability, information quality, and service, then to the possibility of citizen participation online. The study from Rutgers is an early example of one with ratings on citizen participation as well as privacy/security, usability, content, and services. It evaluates different aspects of official websites, including to what extent government provides information and services, uses information technologies to be more user-friendly, and provides convenient access for citizens to participate online. While our study centers on New Jersey because of the in-depth nature of this survey's participation data, New Jersey is a reasonable choice for a one-state study. To allow researchers to generalize any findings to other jurisdictions, a state should not be an outlier in e-government provision. West's (2008) survey of government websites in America classified New Jersey as average in providing e-government information and services, rating it number 22 among 50 states. It has 565 municipalities with populations ranging between 5 and 277,140 based on 2010 data. It allows municipalities choices among different governmental structures. Several different laws allow municipalities created at different times and of different sizes to choose from a list of 12 structural templates that include, for example, several different statutory bases for choosing a council-manager or mayor-council form. This flexibility allows the research study to explore relations between e-participation offerings and three structures: mayor-council, council-manager and township However, despite the availability of a multi-dimensional survey with participation data and a state that allows flexible choices as to structure, the study has limitations. The 2012 New Jersey e-Governance Survey only focused on the largest 100 municipalities in the state. Because of some missing data in other variables, the final sample size is only 97. As we cannot assume that these relatively large jurisdictions are representative of all the New Jersey municipalities, caution must be taken in generalizing findings to other New Jersey governments not covered by

the survey. To generalize our findings to out-of-state localities requires even greater caution considering their unique legal and political realities. Despite these concerns, this research can provide some preliminary insights about the impact of structure on municipal e-participation offerings. In our research, we measure the dependent variable of e-participation offerings, through the “Citizen Participation” score each of 97 surveyed municipalities received in the 2012 Rutgers e-governance survey. This score reflects whether a municipality provided opportunities for citizens to participate online. A jurisdiction might do so, for example, by providing access for citizens to give comments or feedback, providing online bulletin boards, and discussion forums, organizing online surveys or polls, or providing other, related activities. We measure the control variable “Technology” through the “Usability” score each municipality received in the Rutgers survey. This score reflects the ability of each city to use information technology to build a user-friendly website, such as by providing a site map or advanced search tools. We measure “Transparency” through the “Content” score each city got in the e-governance survey. This score indicates the extent that government provided information such as public meeting minutes, human resources management, budgeting information, and so on to citizens. To measure the “e-Services” a government provided, we used the “Service” score from the Rutgers e-governance survey. This score reflected the government's capacity to use online methods to provide services to citizens, such as enabling citizens to pay utilities and taxes, apply for permits online, pay property assessments, and request information or services. We measured the “Budget” of each municipality through its budget dollars. We measured “Government Size,” by the number of municipal employees. 5. Findings The correlation matrix in Table 1 indicates that these variables do not show high correlation among themselves. The descriptive analysis (indicated in Tables 2 and 3) shows that the mean for e-participation is 2.48 out of a possible 20, which is very low. The minimum score of these 97 municipalities is 0.83, while the maximum is only 5.42. Table 3 shows the percentage of each form of government among the 97 municipalities: 43 mayorcouncil, 18 council-manager, and 13 township. Table 4 lists the top 10 municipalities in e-participation with their government forms. The average score for these jurisdictions is 4.42, which again confirms the low level of e-participation in New Jersey. Among these municipalities, seven have the mayor-council form; two have the Council-Manager form; and one has the Township form. In addition, the table shows that the top four cities all use the mayor-council structure. These findings reflect the superiority of the mayor-council form in enabling e-participation performance. In this study, the dependent variable and control variables are interval variables. The independent variables are nominal variables. For that reason, ordinary least square regression was used to test the impact of government form on e-participation offerings. The correlation matrix in Table 1 indicates that there is no high correlation and the multicollinearity threat does not exist.

Table 1 Correlations among dependent, independent, and control variables.

e-Participation Council-manager Mayor-council Township Technology Transparency e-Services Budget Municipal Size

e-Participation

Council-manager

Mayor-council

Township

Technology

Transparency

e-Services

Budget

Municipal size

1 0.0495 0.0322 0.0678 0.2954 0.4851 0.4562 −0.0282 −0.1215

1 −0.426 −0.1878 0.0409 −0.0826 0.0419 −0.0914 −0.1858

1 −0.3511 −0.0085 −0.0077 −0.0867 0.0527 0.3712

1 0.0412 0.1548 0.0369 0.0579 −0.1707

1 0.3607 0.2083 0.1537 0.1694

1 0.4205 0.0218 0.0538

1 0.0141 −0.2632

1 0.3331

1

Please cite this article as: Zheng, Y., et al., The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities, Government Information Quarterly (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.06.004

Y. Zheng et al. / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2014) xxx–xxx Table 2 Descriptive statistics of dependent variable and control variables.

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Table 4 Top 10 municipalities in e-participation.

Variable

Mean

Std. dev.

Min

Max

City

Government form

e-Participation score

e-Participation Technology Transparency e-Services Budget (million) Municipal size (thousand)

2.48 12.32 8.21 7.15 74.60 51.4

0.87 1.79 1.41 1.74 91.20 38.38

0.83 8.13 4.76 1.64 8.60 24.16

5.42 16.25 12.06 11.15 716.00 278.15

Bayonne Hoboken Mahwah Wayne Ocean Township Bernards Township East Brunswick Hamilton Howell Township Gloucester Township

Mayor-council Mayor-council Mayor-council Mayor-council Council-manager Township Mayor-council Mayor-council Council-manager Mayor-council

5.42 5.00 5.00 4.58 4.58 4.17 4.17 3.75 3.75 3.75

The regression results are in Table 5. R-square is 0.3545, representing the overall fit of the model. As to the impact of independent variables, when controlling the influence of control variables (Technology, Transparency, e-Services, Budget, and Municipal Size), neither the council-manager government form nor the township government form has any significant impact on e-participation. However, the impact of the mayor-council form is statistically significant in the model at the 0.10 level. The results show that municipalities with the mayor-council form of government are more likely to provide opportunities for citizens to participate online, which means that these municipalities would have higher levels of e-participation offerings. Among the control variables, transparency and e-services have statistically significant impacts on e-participation at the 0.01 level. Governments with higher levels of transparency are more likely to provide online opportunities for citizens to participate. In addition, governments which provide more services online are more likely to provide online opportunities for citizens to participate. However, the results do not show significant impacts for technology, budget, and municipal size on e-participation. Whether governments provide opportunities for citizens to participate online is more likely to be determined by the political environment impacted by form of government, instead of the capacity of government (as shown in its budget, technology use, and size). Political will matters in developing e-participation opportunities.

The findings of this research provide new information on the impact of government form on e-participation. The study offers evidence that, at least in New Jersey, mayor-council governments are more likely to promote e-participation. A few examples from high-performing jurisdictions illustrate some of the techniques they use. Although many studies find that local e-government is mainly informational and not designed to promote interactivity (Royo, Yetano, & Acerete, 2014), Bayonne, the top ranked city, offers the public phone numbers and email addresses to contact department heads and political officials such as the mayor or city clerk. This provision allows users to provide feedback on administrative performance. The city's phone directory, which covers all the municipal departments, is available on the homepage. Users can download and print it or even share it through Facebook and Twitter. Their comments can go directly to public officials (such as the mayor) by filling out the online forms.

Hoboken, the second highest ranked jurisdiction, provides convenient online surveys so that users can give the city their opinions on upcoming projects. Hoboken has run surveys on building a new park in the city's southwest section, redesigning Washington Street, and building a new boathouse. It also ran surveys to elicit public opinion on the city's Green Infrastructure Strategic Plan and on city measures for sustainability. By conducting these surveys, Hoboken is better able to understand current public opinion and what citizens expect from municipal design and program implementation. The evidence of this study on government form has ramifications for the ongoing debate in the public administration literature on the influence professional city executives have on local democracy. Kweit and Kweit (1981), Franklin and Ebdon (2005), and Nalbandian (1999) all argued that the city manager form of government was more likely to seek citizen input than other forms of government because city managers were full-time professional administrators. However, this view neglects the perspective that expert executives may devalue citizen input because they think citizens lack the knowledge and skills to participate. Having earned their positions through educational attainments, professional managers may place greater reliance on the importance of having knowledge learned in formal rather than community settings. They may devalue the informal know-how citizens have about their own lives and circumstances. As information technologies develop, more and more governments have the ability to build multipurpose, interactive websites. Cost and complexity of information technology are not primary impediments for governments to develop e-participation, especially in developed countries. The Rutgers e-governance surveys tend to give government websites relatively high scores on usability, reflecting their technical abilities. The New Jersey survey found that many government websites are user-friendly, with advanced tools to find the information and services that clients need. In this situation, the willingness of government to provide access for citizens to participate, rather than its technical capacity, becomes the key factor in determining the level of eparticipation. In this aspect of influence, the mayor-council form of government has advantages over the council-manager form since citizens in mayor-council municipalities have more interest in participating

Table 3 Distribution of government forms in the sample.

Table 5 Regression analysis results.

6. Discussion

Government form

Freq.

Percent

Cum.

Dependent variable:

e-Participation

1923 Municipal Manager Law Borough (New Jersey) City (New Jersey) Faulkner Act (council-manager) Faulkner Act (mayor-council) Faulkner Act (mayor-council-administration) Faulkner Act (small municipality) Special Charter (New Jersey) Town (New Jersey) Township (New Jersey) Walsh Act Total

3 4 2 18 43 2 1 5 1 13 5 97

3.09 4.12 2.06 18.56 44.33 2.06 1.03 5.15 1.03 13.4 5.15 100

3.09 7.22 9.28 27.84 72.16 74.23 75.26 80.41 81.44 94.85 100

Independent Variables:

Government form (council-manager) Government form (mayor-council) Government form (township) Technology Transparency e-Services Budget Municipal size

Control Variables:

Coefficient

Std. err.

T score

0.12

0.23

1.22

0.18*

0.20

1.62

0.07

0.26

0.69

0.14 0.33*** 0.27*** −0.02 −0.12

0.05 0.06 0.05 8.89e−10 2.41e−06

1.45 3.24 2.61 −0.25 −1.10

R-square = 0.3545; *p b 0.1, **p b 0.05, ***p b 0.01.

Please cite this article as: Zheng, Y., et al., The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities, Government Information Quarterly (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.06.004

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through voting and government officials are therefore likely to value citizen input to a greater degree. A mayor's need for public support may undergird the mayor-council form's becoming the structure that is more likely to provide online citizen participation access. Caution is needed, however, in interpreting this finding. Nobody randomly assigned municipalities in NJ to mayor-council, councilmanager or township categories. Each jurisdiction selected a structure based on its own unique historical, social, and economic circumstances. It is possible, therefore, that some antecedent and historical variables or conditions both influenced a particular municipality adapting one structure rather than another, and also influenced its subsequent development of e-participation opportunities. No research on this subject will ever totally surmount this methodological barrier as it is unrealistic to assume that jurisdictions would submit to random assignment of structure. Knowing this, we can only say that our research is a preliminary study that could receive further—but still partial—support through a multi-state study. 7. Conclusions Because websites are a function of computer software, it is easy to take a technological approach in analyzing their formation. But this study shows that technology as measured by usability does not have a significant impact on e-participation. In the Rutgers survey, the average level of municipal technology scores is 12.32 while the average for e-participation is 2.48. The great gap between scores in the two domains confirms the point that having technology available and knowing how to use it are not sufficient conditions for initiating e-participation opportunities. Governments which can deploy information technologies to build great websites for dispensing services might still provide limited access for citizens to express their opinions, and to participate in the decision-making process. In this situation, the willingness of government to involve citizens in its management processes would be more important than technological capacity to improve citizen input online. Political will undergirds the essence of e-participation. Although the roles of political factors in e-participation adoption and development have been explored by many researchers, the influence of government form on e-participation was still missed prior to our study. Using data from New Jersey municipalities in 2012, we tested the impact of government structure on e-participation and found that mayor-council governments are more likely to enable citizens to participate online. Given the contentious debates on the role of structure on democracy, researchers need to replicate our findings in other states to show that they remain robust in a variety of legal and social circumstances. In the meantime, however, this research suggests that political will trumps technology as a source for developing opportunities for e-participation. Future researches should include more variables in the model and test the impact of government structure on e-participation with a larger sample size, which would help to make the argument clearer and more convincing. References Adams, G. (1992). Enthralled with modernity: The historical context of knowledge and theory development in public administration. Public Administration Review, 52(4), 363–370. Baker, D. L. (2009). Advancing e-government performance in the United States through enhanced usability benchmarks. Government Information Quarterly, 26(1), 82–88. Barnes, W., & Williams, B. (2012). Applying technology to enhance citizen engagement with city and county government. In H. L. Schachter, & K. Yang (Eds.), The state of citizen participation in America (pp. 163–194). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Basehart, H., Kane, F., Wagenhals, E., & Hedger, S. (2000). Mayor-council vs. councilmanager: Two forms of self-government. Retrieved from. http://www.salisbury. edu/pace/publications/Newsletters/PACE%20Mayor%20Council%20vs%20Council% 20Mayor.pdf Benito, B., & Bastida, F. (2009). Budget transparency, fiscal performance, and political turnout: An international approach. Public Administration Review, 69(3), 403–417.

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Yang, K., & Callahan, K. (2007). Citizen involvement efforts and bureaucratic responsiveness: Participatory values, stakeholder pressures, and administrative practicality. Public Administration Review, 67(2), 249–264. Zhang, Y., & Yang, K. (2009). Citizen participation in the budget process: The effect of city managers. Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management, 21(2), 289. Yuepeng Zheng is a PhD student at the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University, Newark. Hindy Lauer Schachter is a professor of management at New Jersey Institute of technology. Marc Holzer is the founding dean of the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers, Newark.

Please cite this article as: Zheng, Y., et al., The impact of government form on e-participation: A study of New Jersey municipalities, Government Information Quarterly (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.06.004