Measure With Care! An Integrative Perspective of EU Digital Government Benchmarking

Advancement and quality of Digital Government (DG) are located among the essential factors in the EU policies’ effectiveness, hence the high relevance of their informed assessment. From a global perspective, all EU Member States represent a very high level of DG development. Within this group, however, the differences are significant. Also, different DG measurement instruments happen to yield results incompatible with one another. In this study, we analyze the concepts and design of three established benchmarking projects — EU’s eGovernment Benchmark, UN’s E-Government Survey, and OECD’s Digital Government Index. Then, we transform and combine their indicators’ recent data for most EU Member States to propose the first iteration of a synthetic “meta-indicator” of DG development (DGBAL), and argue that through the adoption of such an approach, peculiarities and nuances of specific instruments are mitigated for the sake of a credible data-based, but more balanced and comprehensive insight into countries’ DG performance.