ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the transitions that governments are making away from a traditional bureaucratic, vertically siloed and paper-based past, and towards a digital government service future. Various visions and diverging realities around digital government service provision to citizens to date are considered, as governments’ ambitions of becoming a service state on the basis of newly available technology- and data-affordances have been more difficult to achieve than originally expected. The chapter discusses emerging issues and barriers to achieving these digital government service ambitions and considers the institutional and democratic implications of digital government service reform.
