Digital transformation is reshaping societies by promoting the adoption of advanced technologies. Moreover, the digitization of public services has become an important focus for governments. In this paper, digital government performance indicators are analyzed to improve the efficiency of digitizing public services. Based on this awareness, the seven main criteria and twenty-one sub-criteria are determined. Then, a fuzzy decision-making framework is proposed to evaluate digital government performance across 165 countries as alternatives. To the best of our knowledge, limited studies have investigated an integrated clustering-based fuzzy decision-making framework for evaluating digital government performance. The intuitionistic trapezoidal fuzzy number-based analytical hierarchy process (ITFNAHP), a part of the introduced framework, is developed to find the weights of the main criteria and sub-criteria. Digital technologies, innovation, and the economy are the most significant criteria for digital government operations. The k-means clustering method is then employed to group the alternatives. The four clusters are obtained from the clustering technique. Next, the technique of order preference similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is introduced to rank the digital governments of each cluster. Switzerland, Rwanda, North Macedonia, and Eswatini are the top choices among others in each cluster, respectively. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis is conducted considering the ten different situations. In addition, the managerial and policy implications are discussed, including the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Erdem et al. (2026) studied this question.