Supplementary Materials

In the analyses presented in used in “Explaining Cross-National Variation in Government Adoption of New Technologies” (forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly) and my book manuscript, Corrupt States: Reforming Indian Public Services in the Digital Age (under review), I evaluate the relationship between multiple country-level variables and government investments in technology-enabled service reforms, or eGovernment. A number of different organizations have conducted cross-national evaluations of eGovernment performance. In order to evaluate the robustness of the relationship between corruption and eGovernment reforms, I use two measures of eGovernment from separate sources.

The first source is an annual survey of country-level eGovernment led by Darrell West and supported by Brown University and the Brookings Institute, which is one of the longest running and most inclusive analyses of this type. Starting in 2001, these annual reports evaluate a range of eGovernment characteristics across 198 countries.

An important characteristic of the West reports is that the scores are relative comparisons, with the methodology for scoring having changed over the last eight years. In particular, for those items that became available generally across nearly all countries, such as government office telephone numbers, evaluation of these characteristics was dropped once their provision reached near ubiquity. As a result, it is possible that a country that provided this information, but nothing else, and continued to provide this information, would see a reduction in its overall score in the year in which provision of this information was no longer evaluated. This means then that the scores in a given year are relative to what is available in all other countries in that given year and that a higher score in each consecutive year requires that a country continue to improve its eGovernment offerings, in line with the qualities being evaluated each year.

The second source is United Nations reports on what it terms eGovernment “readiness,” published on a semi-regular basis since 2002. These reports evaluate not only the provision of eGovernment via government websites, but also related national characteristics such as the character of the telecommunications infrastructure and national human resources. Scores for each of these areas are then combined to produce an overall eGovernment Readiness score. For my purposes, I draw only on the UN’s evaluation of eGovernment provision in the form of government websites, which provides what should be a good alternative measure to that of West.

As with the West reports, the United Nations focuses on the provision of eGovernment services to citizens, rather than to the private sector or between government agencies (United Nations 2003, 10). The United Nations reports have been commissioned on an irregular basis and, like the West reports, have modified their methodologies over time. UN eGovernment reports are available for 2002-2005 and 2008, but the methodology in the 2002 report is very different for that of the latter reports, making the scores somewhat incomparable.

Across the two surveys, there are two key ways in which the methodology differs, and so may lead to variation in overall country scores. First, while both surveys evaluate only central government offerings, the range of government websites evaluated differs. The West eGovernment surveys look at a wider range of government sites in each nation, considering executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, as well as at least eighteen different government agencies and departments. The United Nations surveys, on the other hand, evaluate the same set of five departmental websites in every country (Health, Education, Social Welfare, Labor and Finance), potentially making the comparison across countries more consistent, but also providing much narrower coverage of government initiatives.

Second, the scoring methodology differs across the two surveys. In the West surveys, evaluators looked for eighteen characteristics, and the presence of these characteristics, such as publications and databases, depending on their extensiveness, was worth up to four points each. In addition, a country could gain up to twenty-eight points, for a maximum of 100, based on the availability of fully online service provision, with one point allocated for each online service.

While the United Nations surveys evaluated many of the same characteristics, they weighted them in a different manner. Each characteristic was considered to be a part of one of five stages of eGovernment development, with each stage analyzed separately. For example, the provision of archived departmental information added to the score for the first stage, “Emerging Presence,” while the provision of downloadable forms added to the score of the third stage, “Interactive Presence.” In all stages there were a possible 100 points, and the scores for each stage were then combined, with equal weighting, to provide an overall score for the country.

In sum, the West reports provide more comprehensive coverage of national eGovernment offerings, both over time and within country, than the United Nations surveys. However, the West surveys do not consider the potential relationships between types of services and the potential benefits to citizens in as comprehensive a manner as the United Nations surveys. These differences are reflected in the correlation of the two scores, which is only .41. As a result, by using both in the analysis, I hope to provide the most comprehensive evaluation of technology-enabled services outcomes across countries as is possible with the range of available data.