The State on digital Era: policy instruments coerciveness and directness effects on federal public services maturity
Electronic government; digital government; policy instruments; ordinal regression
The maturity of electronic government in public services has a variability that is not yet sufficiently clarified. Studies on implementation factors have pointed out technological and organizational variables for the success of electronic government initiatives and have recently begun to be used to explain maturity levels. However, electronic government literature is criticized for not considering political dimension, thus disregarding important influences of the government context. This thesis uses the literature of government instruments to study the maturity of electronic government of 1,527 federal public services from official secondary data collected by ENAP. The policy instruments coerciveness and directness affect the maturity of public services. The research is quantitative, with logistic and multinomial regressions, plus an ordinal regression using partial proportional odds and partial continuation ratio models. Six hypotheses are tested, as well as a hypothesis about the global or local scope of the effect of variables on maturity levels. Implementation factors related to the impedance of barriers, induction of facilitators and the institutional logic of the centrality of the user, as well as the coerciveness and directness of government instruments on the maturity of electronic government were studied. It has been confirmed that implementation variables affect maturity, especially the positive effect of the user-centric institutional logic, and the negative effect of impedance. The directness of government instruments has a negative effect on maturity level, almost as much as the impedance variable. Coerciveness has a positive effect on maturity level. Medium coerciveness affects maturity levels positively, more than high coerciveness. Theoretically, the thesis extends the electronic government literature by proposing that medium coerciveness and directness impact maturity levels of public services. The thesis also contradicts some theoretical conjectures about the local or global range of the variable effects on maturity level. The results can assist national digital government policies as they establish political criteria for evaluating electronic government maturity in public services.