Input, throughput, and output legitimacy of government measures are considered to be essential for governance capacity in crisis. During the COVID-19 crisis, governments around the world developed digital contact-tracing applications to support their crisis management—with varying degrees of success. While Norway is seen as a high performer in the crisis, the contact-tracing app called Smittestopp developed in Norway had little impact. Using a case study, we studied the governance capacity and legitimacy of this technology in terms of how it was developed, how much it was utilized by citizens, and its usefulness relative to other government measures. Although the app did very little to help the COVID-19 crisis management in Norway, we identify some important lessons to be learned. We argue that the initial input and throughput legitimacy is important if a government policy is to maintain output legitimacy over time and be effective in a crisis. Consequently, this study contributes to the literature on governance capacity and legitimacy in crisis management.

In recent decades, public organizations have undergone significant changes related to digitalization. These changes are the result of multiple, varying influences, such as external institutional feedback. The issue of digitalization feedback development in public organizations opens the discussion on how to study digitalization over time. In this article, we consider whether the method of quantitative text analysis can be used to observe the same administrative trends in digitalization as found using other methods and data sources in existing research. After conducting a co-occurrence analysis of documents from the Norwegian Customs Agency (NCA) over a period of 20 years, we found that the NCA's digitalization-related language changed in this period and that user feedback was the most frequently emphasized kind of external feedback. These observations are consistent with the literature, which shows that the use of co-occurrence methodology to study public administration has a positive role in future research. Points for practitioners: Quantitative text analysis is an effective method to observe administrative trends. Findings of the study corroborate with previous research showing that current administrative trends emphasize collaboration between public organizations and citizen participation as central development features of digitalization of public organizations. The co-occurrence analysis has some limitations and needs to be further improved to develop theory and identify new areas of public administration digitalization.

This paper examines the crisis management learning by the Norwegian government after the COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on types of learning based on the concepts of governance capacity and legitimacy. Using unique interview data with 36 elite administrative and political executives in Norway, the study finds varied learning by the involved actors, and most learning about coordination between ministries and agencies, which are amplified by the lack of knowledge related to analytical capacity. The study contributes to advance the analytical understanding of crisis management learning and provides insight into what a high performing government in the pandemic attempts to learn.