Digital State Capacity
by Paul Raschky
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of digital state capacity, a state's ability to use information technology to enhance its capacity for information provision and collection. The first part of the paper develops a data-driven measurement of digital state capacity. Using text-as-data methods we capture the ICT capabilities and digital infrastructure from over 350,000 government entities across 1,979 sub-national locations in 195 countries. We then use this data to construct objective and comparable indicators of governmental digital capacity and validate them against existing measures of state capacity and other economic and institutional variables. The second part of the paper applies the digital state capacity measure to investigate governmental information provision and distortion online. Using IP address matching, we link government-owned IP addresses to 47,000 anonymous Wikipedia edits and analyse whether governmental entities act as impartial providers of public knowledge or, conversely, seek to distort information for various ends. Our findings underscore the potential for high digital state capacity to support transparent, accurate information dissemination, as well as the risks associated with state-driven knowledge distortion.