In 1980, Dwight Waldo identified five key areas that would challenge public administration in the future: legitimacy, authority, knowledge, control, and confidence (Waldo 198, 166). Not in existence when Waldo wrote the book in 1979, the Internet triggered changes in human behavior and society that make Waldo's observations accurate today. As society becomes more diverse and complex, the degree of specialization increases, which requires bureaucracy to hire more specialists and separate responsibilities further in public administration. Using the Internet, e-government is a vehicle delivering services to citizens since the network acts as a platform that offers ease of use and broad access to an interface with public administration. E-government mitigates several of Waldo's five problem areas and is a proxy for democratic public administration. One question is whether websites already in place addresses these problem areas. Operationalized into measureable items, this study uses Waldo's five problem areas as variables while investigating two hundred websites at four levels of government from the advanced democracies of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany.

In times of budget stress and growing fiscal deficits, pressure is on public management and elected officials to explain what public administration does and to interact with the people so that limited resources are spent wisely and trust in government is maintained. The Internet and government websites are a bridge between government and the people. As this research suggests, the hurdles to successfully implement e-government are less technical and more cultural. A significant portion of earlier inquiries regarding government focuses on compliance and regulatory affairs. By examining five advanced democracies, this study contributes to the understanding of the state of e-government as a proxy for democracy in developed countries. Although the countries under study share the same level of development, this comparative study enables an investigation of their e-government cultural differences. This dissertation ends with a chapter that outlines future directions for inquiries to better understand how the Internet serves as a proxy for democratic transparency and accountability.