Abstract:

Increasingly governments are seeking to use the Internet to communicate in new ways with their citizens. This paper reports on research into the uptake of e-government services amongst members of the public. It was conducted over a three year period and involved a minimum of 27 countries each year. The paper proposes a model of e-government use, which identifies five types of behaviour: information seeking, downloading, consulting, providing information, and transacting. The paper also explores users' and non-users' views about how safe they consider it is to provide personal information, such as a credit card number, to government departments.