Governmental Structures, Social Inclusion, and the Digital Divide

Abstract This study discovers the level of relationship between democracy and access to online information. It defines democracy using freedom ratings from Freedom House, as well as economic factors such as Gross Domestic Product and Foreign Direct Investment. The model also included a data set from Geddes, Wright and Frantz (2012), who used a finer grained scale for autocratic countries. It then explores the relationship between democracy and the level of access to online information using an ordinary least squares regression model. The level of access to online information was defined as the number of the internet users per capita within a country. The strength of the relationship indicated that this definition explained ~57 % of the interaction between these variables. In addition, the civil liberties ranking of a country was determined to have a statistically significant relationship to the number of internet users while the political rights of a country did not have a statistically significant relationship to the number of internet users. By determining this level of relationship, policymakers can then make a more informed decision while deciding on methods to bridge the digital divide. In determining which factors can be adjusted by outside stakeholders, such as access to technology, and those factors which cannot, such as levels of democracy, policymakers can determine methods to increase their impact in narrowing the digital divide.