The triad of digital governance: performance, participation, and digital implementation

This article presents an empirical and quantitative analysis of the role of perspectives associated with digital governance and local institutional performance. Through these analyses, a strong emerging correlation is identified between the valuation of citizen participation from digital media, the level of digital/technological implementation of public entities, and the valuation of institutional performance. This triad determines that institutional performance tends to correlate positively with better levels of citizen participation through digital media, as well as the level of digital/technological implementation; this is empirically tested using multivariate regressions and is robust across different specifications. Finally, this study presents a propensity score matching approach to correct for selection bias analysis of the relationship between the exposure to digital/virtual/technological attention of the digital governance phenomenon to increase the level of institutional performance. The results confirm that exposure to digital/virtual/technological services tends to improve the perceived performance of public institutions.