Designing E-Government Legal Institutions

Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand the way digital government laws are designed through the analysis and comparison of general objectives, governance mechanisms and roles assigned to stakeholders of six local state digital government laws in Mexico. Our findings reveal a strong degree of similarity between general objectives and implementation mechanisms in those six laws, showing a mix of traditional bureaucratic features and new public management features. We also find significant differences between those laws in the mobilization of behavior-constraining rules to fulfill e-government processes and solution-guiding mechanisms to foster innovation.