Understanding Inconsistent Corruption Control through E-government Participation: Updated Evidence from a Cross-Country
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Understanding Inconsistent Corruption Control through E‑government Participation: Updated Evidence from a Cross‑Country Investigation Lihua Wang1 · Xin(Robert) Luo2 · M. Peter Jurkat2 Accepted: 17 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Based on data from 133 countries, this paper unveils and empirically proves a nonlinear relationship between e-participation and corruption control and further examines the moderating roles of voice and accountability and ICT infrastructure. The empirical analysis suggests that (1) e-participation has a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship with corruption control; (2) voice and accountability negatively moderate the relationship between e-participation and corruption control; (3) ICT infrastructure positively moderates the relationship between e-participation and corruption control. Our findings identify the relationships among e-participation, voice and accountability, ICT infrastructure, and corruption control, and provide implications for combating corruption in implementing e-participation initiatives for e-government. Keywords E-government · E-participation · Corruption control · Voice and accountability · ICT infrastructure
1 Introduction For the past decades, corruption has assumed a crucially paramount role in e-government research. Defined as acts in which the power of public officials is used for personal gains in a manner that contravenes the rules of the game [27], * Xin(Robert) Luo [email protected] Lihua Wang [email protected] M. Peter Jurkat [email protected] 1
School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China
2
Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
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corruption is one of the main obstacles to investment and growth, especially in developing economies [53]. The pertaining literature has suggested that e-government is an effective tool to enhance governmental transparency and reduce corruption [1, 6, 7, 10, 11, 16, 19, 24, 25, 29, 30, 33, 38, 40–42, 44, 56–58, 61, 80]. The main underlying assumption of supporting studies in the literature is that when citizens have more access to government websites, they tend to have a higher chance to monitor the activities of government more closely, thereby making corruption riskier to commit [1, 30]. In addition, the e-government literature holds that e-participation denotes the extent of governmental encouragement through e-government websites for citizens to use [62], and specifically defines e-participation as the quality, usefulness, and relevancy of the information and services and the willingness of countries to engage citizens in public policymaking through the use of the e-government programs. Adoption and use of e-participation technologies not only provide the government with a potentially powerful means to access, acknowledge, and address citizen and other stakeholders’ needs, but also help promote the engagement and cooperation of citizens and other key stakeholder
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