Digital citizens or digital outcasts? On the evolving relation between social stratification and utilization of e-administration

Abstract This study examines how digital inequalities evolve over time by analysing the diffusion of e-administration services in Spain between 2017 and 2023. Bridging technological innovation diffusion frameworks and social stratification approaches, we conceptualise the digital divide as a dynamic process in which the social bases of exclusion shift rather than simply diminish. Using nationally representative data from the ICT Household Survey, we apply pooled Heckman selection models with year interactions, Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and distributional inequality measures to trace changes in digital engagement across education, income, and activity status. Rather than a monotonic decline, results reveal a cycle: inequality in predicted e-administration engagement widened during the pre-COVID period before compressing sharply from 2021 onward, in correspondence with pandemic-driven forced digitalisation and concurrent public investment in digital infrastructure. This convergence is driven by structural effects rather than compositional change and is particularly pronounced in the collapse of educational and income gradients. Overall, our findings suggest that investment in digital public infrastructure can reduce socially stratified patterns of e-administration usage. Yet equalisation remains incomplete: rather than eliminating digital inequalities, diffusion appears to reconfigure them, shifting the axis of exclusion from between-group categorical divides to within-group heterogeneity concentrated at the very bottom of the distribution.