The Key Elements and Practical Pathways for Building a High-Performance Digital Government
With the wave of digitalization,digital government has become an important means to enhance governance capabilities and improve governance effectiveness.In this context,local governments in China have begun to develop digital government initiatives.However,in practice,there has been an imbalance in the development of digital government across different regions.On one hand,the eastern region has seen rapid progress in digital government development;on the other hand,the central and western regions have experienced more setbacks than successes in their digital government initiatives.While existing literature has focused on the institutional design and typical cases of digital government,there is insufficient attention paid to how to build high-performance digital government.This study conducts fixed-effect quantitative analysis and crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis at the prefecture-level city government granularity.Specifically,relevant first-hand data is collected using Python web crawling,combined with data from the"China City Statistical Yearbook,"statistical bureaus of prefecture-level cities,and the People's Daily Online leadership message board to construct a panel dataset of prefecture-level cities from 2011 to 2019.The study adopts the measurement method of Quan Yizhang and Chen Yifan(2024)to calculate the degree of digital government development in 229 prefecture-level cities.It identifies eight factors influencing digital government development based on three dimensions:"resource allocation,""performance diffusion,"and"catalytic promotion."The fixed-effect regression analysis examines the statistical significance of these eight factors and finds that all variables,except for the educational degree of the top leader,have a positive promoting effect on digital government development.Based on this,the study divides the cities by region and refines the top 1%cases to combine the conditional variables,analyzing the configuration paths for the eastern,central,and western regions.The analysis reveals that horizontal pressure is a necessary condition for achieving high-performance digital government in eastern cities,fiscal support is a necessary condition for central cities,and fiscal support,vertical pressure,and government attention are necessary conditions for western cities.Eastern cities have two paths:"externally promoted"and"internally driven."Central cities have two paths:"leadership-focused"and"environment-catalyzed."Western cities have a"collaborative construction"path.Compared with previous studies,the marginal contribution of this paper is as follows:first,this paper adopts Python crawler technology to obtain first-hand data,and combines multiple data sources to build panel data set of prefecture-level cities,which provides a more comprehensive and accurate data foundation for the study of digital government construction.Secondly,this paper adopts the method of fixed-effect measurement and crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis,which not only considers the statistical relationship between variables,but also pays attention to the differences between regions and the allocation path.This comprehensive analysis method makes the research results more comprehensive and in-depth,and provides quantitative and qualitative understanding of digital government construction.Finally,229 prefecture-level cities are divided into regions,and the construction paths of digital government in eastern,central and western regions are analyzed respectively.Through qualitative comparative analysis,the paper reveals the necessary conditions and path selection of digital government construction in different regions,and provides targeted construction strategies and decision-making references for governments in different regions.The research in this paper reveals the internal logic of how to build a high-performance digital government to a certain extent,which is helpful for governments in different regions to choose the path to build a digital government according to local conditions under the condition of heterogeneous resource endowment,and implement precise policies to realize the construction of digital government.
digital governmentgovernment governancegovernance modernizationresource allocationperformance diffusioncatalytic advancement
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