Understanding Systems of e-Government: e-Federalism and e-Centralism in the United States and Kazakhstan

The book introduces readers with the results of the comparative cross-institutional analysis on e-government politics in the United States and Kazakhstan, which, from an administrative context, represent, respectively, typical federal and unitary states. The results of one-year field studies and research that the author of the monograph conducted in the USA as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in 2011-2012 provided a rich empirical basis to write the monograph. In this regard, the research provides new evidences to support the hypothesis that the unique features of the administrative-territorial division and traditions of public administration existing, respectively, in federal and unitary states have a fundamental impact on the implementation of e-government policies pursued by national authorities in countries with similar administrative and institutional structures, which are eventually conceptualized in the book in decentralized and centralized models of e-government realization politics, i.e. in electronic federalism and electronic centralism, respectively. According to the author of the research, the results of the comparative analysis, to some extent, could be extrapolated, correspondingly, to all federal and unitary states in a much wider global setting.