Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on public managers’ attitudes toward digital transformation

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a process of digital acceleration and has likely changed the attitudes of local public managers toward information and communication technology (ICT). While this attitude change has been reasonably argued, it has not been systematically measured. This study narrows this gap by measuring the attitudes of public managers before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, this study finds that the pandemic has led public managers to be more confident in the capacity of ICT to help cities achieve their economic, social, and environmental goals and respond to challenges. Both explicit and implicit measures confirmed attitude changes. The explicit measures also indicated that the change in public managers’ attitude toward ICT was similar to their change in attitude toward scientific progress and greater than their change in attitude toward other issues that have played a major role during the pandemic, namely, climate change, citizen participation, and privacy.