In the modern digital era public services and public administrators are increasingly accountable (often in real time) to citizens querying or critiquing policy mistakes or decisions or actions, or voicing complaints and demanding redress, directly in the sphere of public debate, using social media and networks. Citizens’ posts often relay compelling evidence to back up their messages, using photographs, videos, sound recordings, digital scanning of documents and materials. They can now also employ AI-synthesized data-collation and analysis of government messages and documents in ways that are hard to brush off or ignore. Critical messages often go viral or trigger ‘pile-ons’ of many others endorsing them, creating strong incentives for public administrators and politicians to resolve or counter them in real-time. These direct action capabilities of citizens have made a reality of a whole range of ‘republican virtues’ previously recommended by influential philosophical positions, but yet problematic because they were very high cost to enforce and very rarely effective. Because actions such as re-posting or ‘liking’ social media messages are low cost, political scientists have tended to underrate them as purely symbolic or non-serious. Yet since they are practicable for diverse interests and are unmediated, continuously operative, cumulative en masse and in real time, and are easily metricized, they have become far more visible and effective than the high-cost ‘legacy’ forms of participation celebrated by democratic theory. They can force even the most rash or ill-intentioned governments and administrations to admit truths, recognize misbehaviours and mistakes, and change course—as with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and multiple online reactions against ICE killings of US citizens in Minneapolis in early 2026. Digital citizen vigilance can thus substantially improve policy delivery, social welfare and democratic responsiveness. Instead of only deploring the serious downsides of digital changes caused by disinformation and populism (greatly magnified wherever democratic ‘micro-institutions’ have been weakened), public administration scholars and practitioners alike need to recognize and positively embrace the enhanced capabilities for ordinary (well-intentioned) citizens to vigilantly hold public governance actors to account.

The relationships between digital governments and private digital technology corporations shape investments that endure for years, even decades. Yet recent changes have been under-researched in public management and accountability studies. Until the 2010s systems integrators (SIs) were dominant, producing proprietary legacy computer systems that still shape government technologies today. Since that time, governments have become increasingly reliant on the online tools and cloud technologies developed by Silicon Valley (SV) firms and platform corporations. To keep digital investments in line with business and civil society progress, governments have had to catch up and innovate with the latest generation of data-intensive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and to adopt some SV organizational culture and practices in government. However, previous long time-lags in public sector responses highlight many lessons for today's digital government change pioneers. In particular, the article illustrates the importance for digital managers of accelerating change in government organizational cultures, and developing the expertise to manage contractual diversity. Until 2010, Anglosphere digital governments struggled to modernize, dependent on large-scale contract relationships with global systems integrators (SIs) and elderly, custom-built legacy systems. Policy-makers have (belatedly) converted to the value of the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies for improving government. Using elite interviews with government officials in three Anglosphere governments, this article traces the origins of this conversion back to Silicon Valley (SV) and platform corporations. These massive firms drove cultural, organizational and technological developments that reduced the influence of SIs. Going forward, SV firms' practices will now drive public management use of data science and AI, shaping financial systems and practices. Drawing together elements from business studies, organizational change, public management reform, digital government and AI scholarship and practice, the authors show how government's relationships with SV firms re-shape political economy relationships and bring digital change in government closer to SV ways of working.

An Institute for Government (IfG) report on 'government at the centre' recommends creating new, rationalist policy machinery (including an inner cabinet) to manage the UK government's four-year policy programmes-faithfully following how the Cameron-Clegg coalition operated in 2010-15. That government's disastrous example shows how politically na & iuml;ve this plan would be. This article draws out its complete infeasibility in late 2024 conditions. The IfG also proposes setting up a new Department for the Civil Service headed by a powerful minister as a counterweight to the Treasury (criticised only for being 'too good' and hence over-dominant). Instead, this article sets out the case for a new and strong Department for Finance, Procurement and Productivity to take responsibility for spending control and other key public management roles, where the Treasury resource management has conspicuously failed in the last decade.