MONEY ON (THE) LINE : A Quantitative Study on the Effects of Different Types of Digital Government Services on Petty Corruption

Sammanfattning: Previous research indicates that improving digital government services may contribute to the reduction of corruption. This study seeks to deepen the knowledge of this suggested causal link in several ways. Firstly, it adds nuance by examining the effects of two distinct sub-types of digital government services on specifically petty corruption. Secondly, it explores whether impacts vary by corruption systemicity level, which has previously been argued to to affect the effectiveness of certain anti-corruption measures. Using a theoretical framework built on economics of crime theory, I posit that the anti-petty corruption impact of digital government services varies between different service sub-types and between more and less systemically corrupt states. Analyzing hitherto unused global cross-country data for the year 2013, using mainly OLS-models, it is found that informational digital government services constitute effective anti-corruption measures in all settings. Transactional digital government services, on the other hand, are not found to have the same uniform reductive impact in all settings explored.