New Book Review Maps How Technology Is Rewriting the Machinery of Government

When governments digitize, the change is rarely as simple as moving paper forms onto a website. A book review published in April 2025 in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance takes up that complexity, examining Advances in E-governance: Theory and Application of Technological Initiatives, a 2018 volume authored by A. M. Trotta and released by Routledge. The review, written by Boyuan Zhao of the Department of Government and Public Administration at the University of Macau, appears in Volume 5 of the journal on pages 82 through 86, and it arrives at a moment when questions about how states adopt, govern, and are transformed by technology have moved from the seminar room to the center of global politics.

E-governance, as a field of study, sits at the intersection of public administration theory, information systems research, and political science. It asks not merely whether a government has a portal or an app, but how digital tools alter the relationship between the state and the citizen, how bureaucratic incentives shift when services are automated, and how accountability functions when decisions are mediated by software. The book under review positions itself across both theory and application, a pairing that the review treats as one of its notable strengths, since many works in the field tend to privilege one side of that divide at the expense of the other.

One of the intellectual anchors visible in the review’s framing is the technology acceptance model, originally developed by F. D. Davis in 1989. The model, among the most cited frameworks in information systems research, holds that two perceptions largely determine whether users adopt a new technology: perceived usefulness, the belief that the tool will improve performance, and perceived ease of use, the belief that operating it will be free of excessive effort. Applied to government services, the model raises an uncomfortable question for digital transformation programs. A citizen who finds an online tax portal confusing, or a civil servant who sees no efficiency gain in a new workflow system, will quietly abandon the technology no matter how ambitious the policy announcement behind it was.

The review’s reference list also points to the role of trust, drawing on work by Gefen and Straub on trust and the technology acceptance model in online shopping, and on McKnight, Choudhury, and Kacmar’s 2002 typology of trust measures for e-commerce. That lineage matters because the stakes differ sharply between buying a book online and interacting with a state. Trust in an e-commerce platform concerns whether a transaction will complete as promised. Trust in e-governance concerns whether personal data will be protected, whether an algorithmic decision can be contested, and whether the digital interface is a genuine channel of the state or a barrier placed in front of it. Scholars in the field have long argued that without institution-based trust, the adoption curves of government technology flatten regardless of usability.

A third theoretical pillar is Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovations, in its fifth edition from 2003, which also appears among the works cited in the review. Rogers’s framework describes how innovations spread through social systems over time, carried first by innovators and early adopters and only later reaching the early and late majorities, with the laggards arriving last, if at all. Transposed to the public sector, the framework helps explain why digital government initiatives so often produce uneven outcomes. A national identity system may be embraced in capital cities while failing to penetrate rural regions, not because the technology is deficient but because the diffusion process depends on communication channels, social networks, and the perceived compatibility of the innovation with existing values and practices.

The review connects these classic frameworks to contemporary developments in the journal’s own pages. Among the works it cites is a 2024 study by Menke, Gomes, and Xavier on the impacts of AI-based anti-corruption audits on risk aversion in decision-making, using Brazil’s ALICE tool as a case study. ALICE applies artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in public procurement, one of the most corruption-prone areas of government activity. The study’s findings on how such audits change the behavior of officials, making them more risk-averse in their decisions, illustrate a theme that runs through the modern e-governance literature: technology does not merely make administration faster, it reshapes the incentives and even the psychology of the people inside the bureaucracy.

Another cited contribution, W. Potipiroon’s 2024 analysis of the TikTok ban votes in the United States House of Representatives, pushes the discussion beyond administration and into technopolitics, the terrain where governments regulate, restrict, and weaponize the same digital platforms that citizens use daily. The inclusion of such work in the review’s frame signals that e-governance can no longer be understood as a one-way story of states adopting tools. States are also actors in a contested digital ecosystem, weighing national security against platform economies, and their choices feed back into public trust in every government technology initiative.

The journal hosting the review, Global Public Policy and Governance, is published by Springer Nature under the exclusive license of the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University, and its scope spans e-governance, public administration theory, science and technology governance, and technopolitics. That breadth is deliberate. The questions raised by Trotta’s book, and by Zhao’s assessment of it, do not respect the boundary between domestic administration and international affairs. A data localization rule in one country affects cloud providers on other continents. An identity platform designed for service delivery can become an instrument of surveillance. The field’s journals increasingly treat these as a single, connected problem set.

What makes the review timely, beyond its scholarly content, is the trajectory of the field it surveys. Since the book’s 2018 publication, governments worldwide have deployed artificial intelligence for everything from fraud detection to chatbot citizen services, while simultaneously confronting the governance failures those deployments can produce, including biased algorithms, opaque automated decisions, and data breaches. The theoretical toolkit highlighted in the review, spanning acceptance models, trust typologies, and diffusion theory, was largely built for an era of websites and portals. Whether those frameworks can carry the weight of generative AI in the public sector is now one of the field’s open questions, and reviews like this one serve as checkpoints on how well the existing literature has prepared researchers for that transition.

For readers outside academia, the practical takeaway is that the success of digital government is not primarily a technical achievement. It is a behavioral and institutional one, resting on whether citizens find digital services useful and easy, whether they trust the institutions behind the interfaces, and whether innovations diffuse through society rather than stalling among early adopters. The review of Advances in E-governance, published as Global Public Policy and Governance Volume 5, pages 82 to 86, consolidates a body of theory that has quietly shaped how governments around the world build their digital faces, and it underscores that the hardest problems in e-governance are the oldest ones in public administration: trust, legitimacy, and the enduring challenge of making institutions work for the people they serve.

Subject of Research: A scholarly review of a book on the theory and application of e-governance technological initiatives

Article Title: Trotta, A. M. (2018). Advances in E-governance: Theory and application of technological initiatives. Routledge

Article References: Zhao, B. (2025). Trotta, A. M. (2018). Advances in E-governance: Theory and application of technological initiatives. Routledge. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(1), 82-86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00111-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00111-1

Keywords: e-governance, public administration, digital government, technology acceptance model, trust, diffusion of innovations, artificial intelligence, anti-corruption, technopolitics, book review, public policy, digital transformation