American grassroots governments have rushed to join the e‐government revolution. Although there is a growing body of e‐government literature, little of it is empirical. Using data from two nationwide surveys, we conduct a longitudinal examination of local government adoption of e‐government, Web site sophistication, the perceived impacts of e‐government, and barriers to the adoption and sophistication of e‐government. We also discuss correlates of e‐government adoption and sophistication with selected institutional factors. We find that e‐government adoption at the grassroots is progressing rapidly (if measured solely by deployment of Web sites). However, the movement toward integrated and transactional e‐government is progressing much more slowly. Continuing research, particularly longitudinal study, is needed to monitor the evolution of e‐government among U.S. local governments, especially to keep pace with the practice and to ascertain the actual impacts of e‐government.

David Coursey is a visiting scholar at Arizona State University's Decision Theater (www.decisiontheater.org). He specializes in public management, information technology, and research methods. Most of his recent work is in public service motivation, measurement models and theory, and e-government.

This paper explores the effect of managerial innovativeness in municipal government on the adoption of e-government, and it examines the association between the adoption of e-government and its outcome. The authors posit an exploratory model: The first part of the model shows how adoption of municipal egovernment is determined by managerial innovativeness orientation, government capacity and institutional characteristics such as city size and government type. The second part suggests how e-government outcomes are associated with the adoption of e-government, government capacity and institutional characteristics. Analysing two different survey data sets of American municipal reinvention and egovernment, this study finds that managerial innovativeness orientation and city size are the most compelling determinants of municipal e-government adoption. Different levels of e-government adoption may yield different outcomes.

In this article, the authors address the recent trajectory of local e‐government in the United States and compare it with the predictions of early e‐government writings, using empirical data from two nationwide surveys of e‐government among American local governments. The authors find that local e‐government has not produced the results that those writings predicted. Instead, its development has largely been incremental, and local e‐government is mainly about delivering information and services online, followed by a few transactions and limited interactivity. Local e‐government is also mainly one way, from government to citizens, and there is little or no evidence that it is transformative in any way. This disparity between early predictions and actual results is partly attributable to the incremental nature of American public administration. Other reasons include a lack of attention by early writers to the history of information technology in government and the influence of technological determinism on those writings.

Over the past two decades or more, advocates of the new regionalism have called for the creation of new forms of regional governance in America. These writers have shifted the rationale for regional governance from issues of efficiency and equity that characterized an earlier literature on regionalism (i.e., the metropolitan reform school) to that of regional economic competitiveness. In this article, I examine the diagnoses and prescriptions of the metropolitan reformers and the new regionalists. I offer a definition of regional governance more in keeping with the older tradition of political science and distinctly at odds with that of the new regionalist. Then I present what I believe are the principal factors that make the achievement of regional governance in American metropolitan areas very close to impossible. My argument, as indicated by the title of this article, is that political impediments overwhelm economic arguments for achieving meaningful regional governance.Over the past two decades or more, scholars and advocates of the new regionalism school have written a number of works calling for the creation of new forms of regional governance in American metropolitan areas (. Regardless of the specific forms of regional governance advocated by the new regionalists, these authors appear to have essentially the same purposes in mind. The first is the establishment of formal or informal methods of combining local governments in metropolitan regions to promote cooperation across a range of issues on the theory that such cooperation will enable regions to be more competitive in the global economy.A second purpose has been to address, through mechanisms of regional governance, the negative externalities or spill-over effects produced by uncontrolled development within governmentally fragmented metropolitan areas. A final purpose has been to use the newly established

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