Measuring E-Government: A Case Study Using Russia

Numerous studies of global electronic government adoption use the presence or absence of website functions to measure development levels and create rankings. This paper investigates whether these ratings really reflect the overall status of e-government by using a case study of the 89 regional governments in Russia. It provides the results of two waves of evaluating these websites using measures derived from prior e-government studies. These website levels are correlated to available data reflecting the status of e-government in many of these regions. It is concluded that website levels are only loosely coupled to the overall state of e-government in these regions. It is therefore hazardous to draw too many conclusions about the development of e-government in various countries using relative rankings that are only based on websites. As a case study, this paper illustrates what can and cannot be done when highly limited data are available.