No-Stop Government: Expected Benefits and Concerns of German Young Adults

Abstract

This paper further investigates the concept of no-stop government and its implementation as an innovative approach in the process of public services delivery. The no-stop government aims to proactively provide public services to its citizens. No-stop government is expected to reduce the citizens’ effort in triggering such processes as they will not have to contact or fill in any forms as previously required by public organizations. Accordingly, researchers are discussing barriers and enablers of this concept, mainly focusing on the government’s perspective. At the time of writing, no research addresses citizens’ views on their understanding of the concept of no-stop government. The contribution of this paper is to provide an analysis of German young adults’ expected benefits and concerns regarding no-stop government services. The results found are then discussed and compared with previous findings. Our research results indicate that most of the benefits and concerns of citizens have already been studied in other contexts and are consistent with previous research findings. For example, citizens expect to save a lot of time if such services are offered, but they are also concerned about potential issues with privacy protection and legislative requirements. In addition, some perspectives contradicted other scholars’ results. By way of illustration, our study found that automated procedures are likely to lead to less discrimination than manual ones, while other research on automated child support payments showed the opposite. Finally, we provide some guidance for the future work of other research teams and practitioners.