Barriers to digital government and the COVID-19 crisis – A comparative study of federal government entities in the United States and Austria

Abstract

Digital government has been an evolving topic in research and practice, and during the COVID-19 crisis, different tools emerged as crucial elements in tackling the crisis. Comparing the federal level in the United States (Anglo-Saxon public interest culture) and in Austria (continental European rule-of-law culture), this article looks at how different barriers to digital government were affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Fourteen semi-structured interviews with experts in United States departments and their Austrian counterparts are conducted. The results show strong similarities between the United States and Austria in cultural barriers (bureaucratic culture, resistance to change, risk aversion) but also in structural barriers (political commitment and resources, workforce) to digital government. The main difference lies in laws and regulations as structural barriers, stemming from the different administrative traditions. Furthermore, the study highlights the dynamic nature of barriers. It shows that a crisis can result in the lowering of both structural as well as cultural barriers. Deliberate removal of structural barriers in experimentation spaces may therefore enhance digital government in ‘orderly’ times as well.

Points for practitioners

Knowing how to overcome certain barriers is essential in innovation processes. This study shows that windows of opportunity can be opened by a crisis, but also provides key learnings for policy measures that can be taken in ‘orderly’ times. Public administrations require space where structural barriers are deliberately removed in order to experiment and learn, which can lower cultural barriers to digital government as well.

Introduction

The COVID-19 crisis has severely impacted societies, governments and businesses worldwide. As the President of the European Court of Auditors stated, ‘the COVID-19 pandemic caused a multidimensional crisis that has affected nearly all areas of public and private life’ (European Court of Auditors, 2021). However, crises can drive innovation, too: they can be an opportunity for reforms, an impetus for public sector organizations to change structures and management processes and thus enhance effectiveness, efficiency and economy (e.g., Kuhlmann et al., 2021). The COVID-19 crisis started with a health crisis, where governments around the globe asked or forced their citizens to stay at home to slow down the infection rate and prevent a collapse of the health care system (United Nations, 2020). This ‘stay-at-home policy’ resulted in the diffusion of information and communication technology (ICT) solutions to very different fields of work (Agostino et al., 2021; Gabryelczyk, 2020).

In general, ICT changes the way governments supply information, deliver public services and deal with the public, and in addition, it has become an integral part of government strategy (Zhang et al., 2014). Different tools and applications, ranging from open data, social media and data analytics to the internet of things, to name a few, have been implemented across all government levels (Gil-Garcia et al., 2018). This has often been subsumed under the concept of ‘digital government.’ The latter has been an evolving topic in research and practice (de Vries et al., 2018; Mergel et al., 2019) as new technological developments account for a continuous transition in the understanding as well as the possibilities of digital government (Zhang et al., 2014).

During the COVID-19 crisis, different tools emerged as crucial elements in tackling the crisis; many organizations have introduced a work-from-home policy for their employees, staying connected via e-mail, online conference tools, cloud solutions and social media (see Freeguard et al., 2020). The United Nations e-government survey closed with an addendum on e-government during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the role of digital technologies in, for example, information sharing, regional cooperation, communication with people and vulnerable groups (United Nations, 2020). Usually, providing public services online is driven by expectations of efficiency and effectiveness, but during COVID-19, it was also a safe way to provide services to citizens without risking infection (Freeguard et al., 2020).

The uniqueness of the current crisis in requiring a higher level of ICT use and the technological developments at hand provide a window of opportunity to investigate the role of the COVID-19 crisis as a catalyst for the diffusion of digital government (e.g., Agostino et al., 2021; Gabryelczyk, 2020). In this context, previous research has identified several barriers that prevent or delay the emergence of digital government (e.g., Cinar et al., 2019; Meijer, 2015). This paper draws on Rogers’ (2003) innovation diffusion theory and aims to explore cultural and structural barriers to digital government (Margetts and Dunleavy, 2002; Meijer, 2015) and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis from a comparative perspective, looking at federal government entities in the United States and in Austria. Comparing these two countries is particularly interesting as they represent different administrative traditions, and therefore present different barriers to digital government (see Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011 for the role of administrative tradition in reforms in general). While the United States is representative of the Anglo-American public interest culture, Austria can be described as a model of bureaucracy with a strong Rechtsstaat (rule of law) culture (see Kuhlmann and Wollmann, 2013). The research builds on semi-structured interviews with digital government experts (i.e., public managers) to address the following research questions: RQ 1: What are the barriers for the diffusion of digital government in the United States and in Austria? RQ 2: Has the COVID-19 crisis affected those barriers, and if so, how? Knowing how an external factor (i.e., the crisis) has shifted barriers contributes to the discussion on how to overcome digital government barriers.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The second section outlines the literature on public sector innovation and digital government. The third section outlines the context of digital government in the United States and in Austria, followed by data and methods presented in the fourth section. The fifth section presents the results, and the final section gives a discussion of the results and a conclusion.

Literature review

Digital government has been widely discussed in the literature, but no common definition exists (see, for example, Mergel et al., 2019). ‘Digital government’ and ‘e-government’ are often used interchangeably (Agostino et al., 2021), although some scholars argue that the term digital government marks a shift from the use of ICT for public administration to the influence of ICT on administration, management and governance (Gil-Garcia et al., 2018). For the purpose of this study, digital government will be defined following the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s definition of e-governance, which has served as a reference point in previous studies (see Gil-Garcia et al. 2018). As such, digital government is understood as ‘the public sector's use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the aim of improving information and service delivery, encouraging citizen participation in the decision-making process and making government more accountable, transparent, and effective’ (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2011).

As digital government changes governments’ approach to service delivery, citizen interaction and accountability mechanisms, it is inevitably connected to (the need for) innovation and reform (Borins, 2001; de Vries et al., 2018; Meijer, 2015). In order to better understand why innovations are adopted in organizations or specific contexts, ample studies have investigated antecedents of innovation (see de Vries et al., 2016; 2018; Zhang et al., 2014) at different levels: these include environmental or contextual factors such as administrative tradition, political aspects, media attention and competition (Borins, 2001; Lapuente and Suzuki, 2020; Lewis et al., 2018); organizational factors such as financial resources or an organization's risk aversion (Borins, 2001; Damanpour and Schneider, 2006); and individual factors such as leadership as well as top managers’ characteristics and attitudes (Damanpour and Schneider, 2006; Lewis et al., 2018). Given the respective studies’ research purposes, the majority of public sector innovation literature has focused on investigating drivers of innovation adoption. Consequently, the antecedents frequently mentioned in this literature may explain non-adoption (if they are absent or little developed), but may not necessarily capture all key factors that explain why innovations are not adopted by certain organizations or in specific contexts.

There is, however, a literature stream that specifically looks at different configurations of structural and cultural factors as barriers to innovation diffusion (Cinar et al., 2019; Savoldelli et al., 2014), and, more recently, at tactics to overcome these barriers (Cinar et al., 2021; Meijer, 2015; Wilson and Mergel, 2022). This is particularly interesting since identifying and understanding difficulties and problems within innovation processes is an important factor for managing these processes (e.g., Cinar et al., 2019). Previous research identified different barriers for public sector innovation, and digital government in particular; for example, resistance to change or a lack of support from certain actors, lack of skills and expertise among the workforce, insufficient financial and human resources, and laws and regulations (see Wilson and Mergel, 2022; Meijer, 2015; for an overview see Cinar et al., 2019; Savoldelli et al., 2014). These barriers can be divided into the two dimensions: structural barriers, such as resources, political commitment, and knowledge; and cultural barriers, such as resistance to change and bureaucratic culture, which preserve traditional procedures (Margetts and Dunleavy, 2002; Meijer, 2015; Wilson and Mergel, 2022).

Although there is a considerable body of research on factors influencing ICT adoption, only a few studies examined spontaneous diffusion and adoption processes of digital government and public sector innovation which would be characteristic for leapfrogging developments during a crisis (see Zhang et al., 2014). To my best knowledge, prior research (before COVID-19) insufficiently addressed the role of crises in adopting, diffusing and implementing ICT in the public sector or general crisis management in the field of public administration (see Kuhlmann et al., 2021). Exceptions to this are studies on the role of e-government in crisis management using the example of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2004 in Singapore (Pan et al., 2005), and on the impact of the latest financial and economic crisis on political priorities and implementation plans of e-government initiatives (e.g., Sideridis, 2013).

Only more recently have scholars started to debate whether COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation in the public sector (e.g., Agostino et al., 2021; Gabryelczyk, 2020). Special issues of journals explore to what extent governments used the crisis for modernization such as digitalization (Kuhlmann et al., 2021), and digital transformation as response to crises (Eom and Lee, 2022); furthermore, studies report that public managers have changed their attitude toward digital transformation (Barrutia and Echebarria, 2021), digital technologies may supported resilience (Clement et al., 2023), and policymakers are pushing for digitalization of public administration (Kuhlmann et al., 2021). These studies give the first insights that the COVID-19 crisis has effects on the diffusion of digital government.

Although a crisis itself has rarely been named as an antecedent in digital government research, the consequences of crises can impact different antecedents of innovation adoption. This article, therefore, explores the role of the crisis as an event that may affect existing barriers and, therefore, foster leapfrogging developments.

Digital government in Austria and in the United States

The countries of interest are both federal states but belong to two different administrative traditions. Austria is an almost ideal-type of the continental European federal administrative tradition with a strong emphasis on the Rechtsstaat (rule-of-law state), while the United States is an ideal-type of the Anglo-American public interest culture. Online supplemental Table 1 summarizes the context characteristics of the investigated countries, focusing on the federal government level.

Austria ranks sixth in the eGovernment Benchmark and tenth in the Digital Economy and Society Index, and is a frontrunner in digital public services for citizens (European Commission, 2021a, 2021b). An interagency platform (österreich.gv.at) provides information to citizens and offers online public services; the web portal FinanzOnline offers financial administration services, and the Business Service Portal (usp.gv.at) was created for businesses. The Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs is dedicated to digital government (reorganized mid-2022) and collaborates with the BRZ (Austrian Federal Computing Center, a privatized information technology (IT) service provider), the Chief Digitalization Officers Taskforce (installed in every ministry), and coordination boards of Digital Administration and DIA (digitalization agency) (Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs, 2022).

While Austria ranks fifteenth in the 2020 E-Government Development Index, the United States is ranked ninth; when it comes to the Online Service Index, which assesses whether certain information, features and transactions are online, both countries have an online service value of 0.9471 (1.0 being the highest value), thus both belong to the top-ranked countries (United Nations, 2020). The United States government offers an interagency online platform (usa.gov), which is an online guide to government information and services but does not provide for transactions on the website itself. The responsibility for digital government rests with the Office of E-Government & Information Technology, which is headed by the Federal Chief Information Officer at the United States Office of Management and Budget, where the United States Digital Service is located (The White House, 2022). The latter is a digital service team such as 18F at the United States General Services Administration (United States General Services Administration, 2022). In addition, the United States departments have Chief Information Officers (CIOs), who communicate via an interagency forum – the Chief Information Officers Council (Chief Information Officers Council, 2022).

In order to explore changes during the COVID-19 crisis, I analysed selected government websites for e-services at two points in time. Before February 2020 (before COVID-19) with the help of the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), and in March 2021 (during COVID-19) data were collected directly on the respective organizations’ websites. The study counts the number of e-services provided on the respective website (links to other websites were not included), with all those services being counted as e-service that the website defined as an e-service. Forms to download as well as digital forms were counted as one and the same, regardless of the number of forms online. Ministries and departments offered more e-services during COVID-19 than before (see online supplemental Table 2). Whereas some e-services added on United States websites were directly related to COVID-19, this was not the case in Austria.

Data and method

Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the effects of COVID-19 on barriers for the diffusion of digital government at the federal government level in the United States and Austria. Due to the topicality of the COVID-19 crisis and its specific characteristics, a qualitative research approach was chosen to obtain accounts from those experiencing the phenomenon of theoretical interest (Yin, 2011).

Purposive sampling and snowballing techniques were applied to identify and select individuals who can give well-informed insights (Yin, 2011); thus, interviews were conducted with digital government experts working for or collaborating with the federal government. Potential interviewees were identified via the websites of the respective departments and were contacted by e-mail. To identify other experts within the federal government, snowball techniques were used, that is, people who had already been interviewed were asked to identify other experts they knew who could provide information on the questions posed.

In total, 14 in-depth interviews with experts in the United States (7) and in Austria (7) were conducted online, using Zoom and Skype for Business. The respondents were experts from ministries and departments such as CIOs, Chief Digitalization Officers, department heads as well as experts from centralized service units, and supreme audit institutions; all of them have expertise and experience in the area of digitalization at the federal government level. Although the number of interviews is relatively limited, partly due to the unique and central role of respondents, interviewing senior public managers from higher levels of the hierarchy can provide a comprehensive overview of the topic and not just a partial perspective (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007). These informants are particularly interesting since top managers’ attitudes influence innovation adoption (Damanpour and Schneider, 2006), and, as upper echelon theory suggests, organizational outcomes can be seen as a reflection of its top managers (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). The interviews took 44 min on average and were conducted between July and November 2021.

Based on the literature in the field (e.g., Cinar et al., 2019; Clement et al. 2023; De Vries et al., 2016; Mergel et al., 2019), a semi-structured interview guideline was developed. The focus of the guideline lies on the barriers to digital government in general, asking questions such as ‘Are there any obstacles or barriers to digitalization or to the adoption of digital innovations in your department?’ This is followed by questions regarding the effects of the COVID-19 crisis. The full questionnaire is provided in the online supplemental material. The interviews were blended with secondary data from government websites and newspaper articles and blogs.

An informed consent form was used to promise anonymity to the interviewees, and all interviews, except for one in the United States, were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The non-recorded interview was transcribed based on the ad-hoc notes taken and notes made from memory. Thematic analysis, a mixed procedure of qualitative content analysis following Mayring (2014), was applied to analyse the transcripts, using MAXQDA qualitative data analysis software. First, the data were analysed deductively in order to identify differences and similarities between barriers in the United States and in Austria along the two main dimensions identified in the literature review. For this purpose, a coding scheme was developed in advance (Mayring, 2014) based on previous literature in the field (provided with anchor examples in the supplemental material). The category ‘others’ captures barriers that were mentioned by only one interviewee with no connection to the COVID-19 crisis, which could not be assigned to the other categories. The coding scheme was applied in the analysis of one United States and one Austrian interview to confirm applicability and revise where necessary. After a final work through, all coded transcripts were summarized per category and country. Second, the transcripts were analysed inductively to identify the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on barriers to digital government. Here, every category of barriers per country was analysed to assess whether the COVID-19 crisis affected it or not. To ensure reliability of the analysis, I and a research assistant analysed and coded all transcripts, which allowed for discussing the coding and achieving an agreement on the codes.

Results

The findings of how barriers for the diffusion of digital government differ in the United States and in Austria as well as how the COVID-19 crisis affected these barriers are presented along two dimensions: structural and cultural barriers. The quotes supporting the specific barriers described in the following are provided in the online supplemental material.

Structural barriers

Structural barriers refer to factors that can occur inside as well as outside of each organization, such as political commitment and resources, laws and regulations, the war for talent, and skills and knowledge of the workforce (Margetts and Dunleavy, 2002; Meijer, 2015; Wilson and Mergel, 2022).

Political commitment and resources

Interviewees in both countries mentioned barriers when a certain programme lacks political commitment, and only if certain tools or technologies fail, they become a priority for political decision-makers. This was particularly mentioned by United States interviewees, who pointed out that government tends to be reactive rather than proactive or preventive; in other words, it only acts when something like a crisis happens. For Austria, an interviewee mentioned that specific investments for internal IT projects, which are not visible to the public, have low political priority. Also, the budget is an issue according to interviewees in the United States, and similarly in Austria, although some interviewees pointed out that certain projects just need a little more persuasion and the budget is not a main obstacle. With budgetary constraints comes a limited number of employees, which is a barrier in both countries. This was perceived as a bigger challenge in Austria, where the workforce has been in decline for more than two decades, but the lack of employees was also a driver to substitute the declining workforce with digital solutions.

In the United States, congressional and legislative investments were noticed; an interviewee pointed to the fact that a billion dollars was put into the Technology Modernization Fund and summarized the COVID-19 effects as follows:

So, the opportunity, the urgency in a sense to build better products, the basic financial investment to bring the country into the 22^nd century. And then just people stepping up, like the talent coming to government and people willing to serve their country. (US1)

A similar situation presented itself in Austria, where the COVID-19 crisis increased the awareness and perceived urgency of digitalization projects in the political arena, and more budget has been provided to expand digital services.

Laws and regulations

Legislative requirements seem to pose certain barriers in both countries. In the United States, some administrative procedures such as a long federal budget process or a security authorization process are perceived as burdensome and they prolong the innovation process. Besides that, the terminology in laws and regulations is perceived as a barrier; for example, the legislative branch says that documents must be submitted by fax machine, and in this context an interviewee mentioned that there is a question about if this is legally required or merely a legal interpretation and that this must be discussed and changed. One obstacle for the United States in relation to providing online services to their citizens is the lack of a national identification (ID) card and thus, several problems of identification and authentication arise. This comes with the question of what is acceptable in terms of a signature, as one interviewee explained:

barrier in terms of digital tools are legal requirements. When can we require something less than a wet signature? (US3)

When it comes to the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on legal requirements, one interviewee put it as follows:

So, I think I mentioned our lack of digital identity. We haven’t fixed that problem, but I think that there's a real renewed effort to fix that problem. (US1)

In Austria, laws and regulations are obstacles too, as one interviewee referring to the rule-of-law, which is a characteristic of a strong Rechtsstaat, pointed out:

a company is allowed to do everything that is not prohibited, while the public administration is only allowed to do what has been expressly assigned to it as a competence in the law, and that is a big difference, of course. So, the legal basis for administration or for digitization in general and the use of digitization in administration is still an enormous challenge, one of the biggest, to be honest. (AT4)

The interviewee also emphasizes the issue that processes as defined in the administrative procedure law rarely have anything to do with the possibilities of digitization. Even before COVID-19 this resulted in the establishment of a living laboratory to test and experiment with digital tools before legislative changes are necessary.

Although interviewees in the United States, particularly those from highly regulated agencies, mentioned challenges such as complying with the regulations and staying accountable when it comes to digitalization, interviewees in Austria perceived this as the core barrier, even though Austria has a national ID card and had already established a mobile signature (Handy-Signatur) years before the COVID-19 crisis.

Another legal sphere was mentioned by interviewees in both countries: the protection of data privacy. One interviewee in the United States said it made it harder and harder to build technologies, there is more paperwork and more process compared to the private sector, and so it takes longer than the public expects. In Austria, an interviewee emphasized the high level of data protection and framed it as a chance for Europe compared to other countries with lower standards but concluded that this makes solutions more complex. While interviewees in the United States did not see any effects of the COVID-19 crisis on this point, in Austria an increased awareness among the employees for data security was observed by one interviewee.

War for talent

Interviewees in the United States as well as in Austria pointed to the fact that public sector organizations have problems when it comes to attracting people on the labour market with the right skills. In the United States, one interviewee described it as a problem that personnel management does not have a specific job series that constitutes, for example, data scientists, and they cannot compete with actors from the private sector. Interviewees in Austria take a similar view regarding the war for talent, where the public sector is competing with the private sector for people with IT skills but see a problem in the rigid salary scheme with low entry salaries. Interestingly, both countries struggle with regulated personnel management in their efforts to attract members of the workforce.

While interviewees in Austria did not mention any effects of COVID-19 on this barrier, one interviewee in the United States sees potential in the remote working approach to hire people anywhere in the country and mentions another observation regarding sector choice:

the quality of the people that I’ve seen, I think the pandemic really shocked a bunch of people into realizing that the government matters and there's a level of service to stepping up and helping the government deliver better products. (US1)

Workforce – skills and knowledge

Skills and knowledge are a barrier, for example when it comes to negotiating with a contractor, when the public sector employees do not speak the same language as the contractor. In Austria, the high average age of the federal workforce was mentioned and that there is a generation of employees less familiar with technologies than younger generations. Also, interviewees in the United States mentioned similar obstacles, although the average age is lower than in Austria. The structure of the existing workforce did not change due to the COVID-19 crisis, but learning effects arose in some areas, as many employees switched to teleworking and had to adopt digital tools to be able to communicate and cooperate.

Cultural barriers

Besides structural barriers, cultural barriers such as bureaucratic culture, resistance to change and risk aversion are also important factors for digital government (Margetts and Dunleavy, 2002; Meijer, 2015; Wilson and Mergel, 2022).

Bureaucratic culture

Most interviewees in both countries named cultural change as a big challenge and emphasized that technology is probably the easiest part of digitalization, but it has everything to do with the people. The interviewees concluded that the COVID-19 crisis accelerated this cultural change, as one Austrian explained:

Home-schooling, home-office, etc. have certainly brought about a huge culture change and made things possible that we would otherwise have debated for a long time. (AT4)

There is now an awareness that digital solutions are needed, which was always up for discussion before, and even a kind of a pioneering spirit developed to offer digital solutions:

But there was also a bit of a pioneering spirit that developed, there really was, there was a real forethought that came about that things could now be approached simply and solved quickly. (AT6)

Resistance to change

Resistance to change can be described as established ‘ways of doing things’ or institutional habits. This barrier was emphasized by most interviewees on both sides of the Atlantic, as two interviewees described:

And sometimes people stand in the way because they like to do what they know how to do and what they’ve been doing, you know, for the past N number of years. (US2)

A little bit like: ‘We’ve always done it that way and that's what we’re used to’. (AT2)

In Austria, one interviewee described that the barriers for digitalization are in the people's minds, but they quickly disappeared during the COVID-19 pandemic:

There are different points [barriers] for me, one is that, practically in the heads of the people. What we have seen now, for example, in the pandemic, that this is partly gone very quickly. (AT7)

The resistance to change fell during the COVID-19 crisis and the appetite for change increased; thus, people were more willing to give up old paths, as an interviewee described:

if we hadn’t had this disruption, people may have been more reluctant to let go of old processes. (US5)

Risk aversion

Risk aversion was named by several United States interviewees as a barrier; they described the government as risk-averse and stated that failure on behalf of the taxpayers is not acceptable. With the COVID-19 crisis, the risk appetite increased, and governments became willing to accept more risk:

the pandemic has increased our risk appetite. We are bit more willing to accept a bit more risk, than we may previously have accepted. (US3)

Also, risk aversion on the individual level has changed; United States interviewees perceived that people now see the benefits and possibilities of digitalization, and the crisis increased the understanding for digitalization. Those who were afraid of modernization now see that it is successful and are less afraid.

Risk aversion on the individual level was not named by the Austrian interviewees. However, interviewees talked about fear, describing that the COVID-19 crisis decreased the fear of digitalization, and people, particularly employees, now saw that the opportunities of digitization outweigh the threats. One Austrian interviewee mentioned that, above all, the COVID-19 crisis had broken down individual barriers of some people who had fundamentally rejected digital solutions.

Discussion and conclusion

This article provides empirical evidence for barriers to the diffusion of digital government. It shows how an external factor (i.e., the COVID-19 crisis) affected these barriers at the federal government level in two countries with very different administrative traditions – the common law tradition in the United States and the Rechtsstaat tradition in Austria. Barriers are investigated along two dimensions: structural and cultural barriers (Margetts and Dunleavy, 2002; Meijer, 2015).

The interviews revealed that barriers existed in both dimensions, in both countries. However, there are nuanced differences in how the COVID-19 crisis affected those barriers. Interviewees in both countries identified that the lack of political commitment and resources, which has been described as a barrier (see Cinar et al. 2019) and conversely, as enabling factors in prior studies (Damanpour and Schneider, 2006; see de Vries et al., 2016; Savoldelli et al., 2014), as having been positively affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

Laws and regulations posed barriers of different scale in the two countries. Laws and regulations have been described as a dominant structural barrier that innovators face (see Cinar et al., 2019, 2021), and also studies on drivers of innovation adoption have argued that unfavourable regulatory aspects hamper innovation (see de Vries et al., 2016; Savoldelli et al., 2014). While interviewees in both countries faced challenges in this regard, laws and regulations seem to be perceived as a bigger barrier in the Austrian context, possibly due to the respective administrative traditions. In common law countries such as the United States, law is an element of governance, ‘but its particular perspectives and procedures are not as dominant as within the Rechtsstaat model’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 62). Rechtsstaat countries may therefore be slower to reform, because management changes always require legal changes (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). This barrier does not seem to have faded due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Workforce seems to be a sphere of important structural barriers. First, this is mirrored in the challenge of attracting people with the right skills, which was observed in the previous literature (e.g., Wilson and Mergel, 2022), even though Austrian interviewees did not perceive that this barrier was affected by the COVID-19 crisis. In contrast, one United States interviewee perceived a positive impact, as people realized that government mattered and were more likely to choose to work in the public sector. It is likely that an external factor such as the COVID-19 crisis prompted altruistic motives in the workforce and this would resonate with prior literature arguing that altruistic work values positively influence the preference for public sector employment (see Korac et al., 2019). Second, in line with prior studies (see Cinar et al., 2019; Savoldelli et al., 2014), skills and knowledge of the existing workforce posed a barrier, and as such supported studies that highlighted job-related skills and knowledge as antecedents of innovation adoption (see de Vries et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2014). This barrier has been only partially affected by the crisis.

Research has identified several structural drivers and barriers for digital government, but cultural barriers have been deemed equally or even more important (see Meijer, 2015; Wilson and Mergel 2022). Along these lines, interviewees in this study particularly emphasized the role of cultural barriers, and interestingly, these seem to differ less between the United States and Austria than the structural kind. Interviewees in both countries identified bureaucratic culture and resistance to change as barriers, thus supporting findings from previous studies (e.g., Borins, 2001; de Vries et al. 2016). This is particularly interesting since Anglo-American countries exert a managerial approach to public sector reforms, while a legal and thus more bureaucratic approach, with administrators as procedural safeguards, seemed more likely in continental Europe (Lapuente and Suzuki, 2020; Meyer et al., 2014). In both countries, the COVID-19 crisis seems to have positively affected the barriers linked to bureaucratic culture, for example, resistance or lack of support from specific actors (see Cinar et al., 2019; de Vries et al., 2016).

Interviewees described that resistance to change decreased in both countries – people saw benefits and opportunities of digitalization and were more willing to leave old paths. This observation supports the findings regarding the effect of COVID-19 on public managers’ attitudes toward digital transformation reported recently (Barrutia and Echebarria 2021). Due to the COVID-19 crisis, employees, public managers, and politicians have learned what digitization can deliver, that it works, and that it is important; thus, signalling a lowering of cultural barriers in both countries. While United States interviewees reported that the barrier of risk aversion faded due to the crisis, Austrian interviewees described a similar development without mentioning risk aversion per se, but rather a decreasing fear of digitalization.

The overall finding of the study is that external events such as the COVID-19 crisis may shift, better yet, lower, structural, and cultural barriers, and thus enhance digital government to a certain degree. It provides further support for Wilson and Mergel's (2022) finding that crises can act as triggering events for digital government. While a global event such as the COVID-19 crisis may not necessarily account for the fading of structural barriers stemming from country contexts (i.e., administrative tradition), it may nonetheless allow governments to experiment with different digital solutions, which would not have been possible without the crisis. This implies that public administrations require space where structural barriers are deliberately removed in order to experiment and learn (see also de Vries et al. 2016), which appears to be even more important in strong Rechtsstaat countries. This, in turn, can also lower cultural barriers (for tactics see Meijer, 2015).

This article contributes to the literature as follows: first, the study contributes a more nuanced picture on the impact of COVID-19 on digital government (e.g., Agostino et al., 2021; Eom and Lee, 2022; Gabryelczyk, 2020), and public administration in general (e.g., Kuhlmann et al., 2021). It provides support for previous findings showing that the COVID-19 crisis was utilized to modernize public administrations (see Kuhlmann et al., 2021), that attitudes toward digital transformation have changed (Barrutia and Echebarria, 2021), and that digital government has been enhanced (Moser-Plautz and Schmidthuber, 2023); second, as cross-country comparisons in public sector innovation research are rare and the previous literature focused mainly on the American Anglo-Saxon perspective (see de Vries et al., 2016), this article can contribute to the discussion on context-specific barriers by showing how findings from the United States context differ from those from federal continental European settings; and third, it contributes to the discourse on overcoming barriers to digital government (e.g., Meijer, 2015; Wilson and Mergel, 2022). While previous research viewed the respective barriers mostly as static (Cinar et al., 2021), this article gives insights into how a multidimensional crisis can lower different types of barriers. As such, it highlights the barriers’ dynamic nature, and supports prior findings on crisis-induced innovation and organizational learning (e.g., Antonacopoulou and Sheaffer, 2014; Temiz and Salelkar, 2020). In this regard, the present article remains descriptive, but bears key implications: understanding how organizational actors perceive windows of opportunity to be opened by a crisis (see also Kuhlmann et al., 2021) provides key learnings for measures that can be taken at the policy level even in ‘orderly’ times. While a recent study by Wilson and Mergel (2022) describes strategies to overcome barriers to digital government, its focus on innovation champions may not be directly applicable to a context characterized by different levels of innovativeness.

The present study has certain limitations that mainly stem from the methodological approach. In general, interview data are prone to represent socially accepted behaviour, and results must be interpreted with this limitation in mind. In addition, when interpreting the results of the analysis, the time of data collection must be emphasized, as other effects, particularly long-term effects on barriers to digital government, might emerge later. This research is also limited by its focus on a specific level of government – the federal government level in the United States and Austria. It is presumed that, for example, local governments face different barriers and different effects of COVID-19. Due to the study design and the context-bound nature, the findings are generalizable only to a limited extent (Yin, 2011). Therefore, it could be worthwhile to investigate other government levels as well as other country contexts, apply different methods, and explore (other) external factors (than crises) that may affect structural and cultural innovation barriers.

Author biography

Birgit Moser-Plautz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Public, Nonprofit and Health Management of the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Her research interests include digital transformation, innovation, and change management as well as budgeting and accounting reforms in the public sector.