e-Government in Sweden: Centralization, Self-Service and Competition

Abstract

The Internet has often been envisioned to have decentralizing effects. Not only should the technology in theory have the potential for making it easier to live and run companies in rural areas, but also this is in fact supposed to happen on such a scale that the countryside would achieve a development similar to that in urban areas. In Europe, and certainly in Sweden, governments–long before Internet use became widespread–established policies to help development in rural areas. It seems then that the Internet would come as a welcome gift, as it is supposed to facilitate such policies; indeed rather make them obsolete if it in fact were true that Internet use would inherently lead to decentralization. This chapter reviews a study concerned with how Swedish government agencies used IT during the period of 1985-1999–to centralize or to decentralize?