A four-cluster typology of the EU member states in digital public services and institutional governance using DESI and WGI data

Efficient and transparent public services foster a competitive business environment and social well-being by facilitating business expansion, job creation, foreign direct investment, etc. In recent years, digitalisation has become a critical requirement for modern public administration and economic progress. Consequently, understanding of a country’s digital and institutional maturity is essential for identifying strategic directions and adopting international best practices for further national development. The research analyses and compares digital maturity and institutional governance across the European Union (EU) by clustering Member States based on the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) to identify development patterns and potentially successful approaches to public service digitalisation. While individual indicators provide initial insights into national differences, they often fail to capture the multidimensional nature of national performance and may lead to misleading rankings. To address this, cluster analysis is used to identify natural groupings of countries (typologies) based on multiple indicators simultaneously. To ensure the objectivity and stability of the findings, two fundamentally different clustering techniques were applied: the non-hierarchical k-means method and hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward’s method), complemented by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The results reveal a four-cluster structure: ‘Advanced Digitalisers’, ‘Challenges Group’, ‘Digital Followers’ and ‘Digital Leaders’, which demonstrates high consistency across both clustering methodologies. The findings indicate that digital maturity is associated with institutional quality – particularly with regulatory quality, government effectiveness, rule of law and control of corruption, which show high loadings on the main governance component aligned with digital public services performance. Practically, this study highlights that sustainable digital transformation requires aligning technological investment with broader administrative reforms; for lower-performing the EU Member States in the ‘Challenges Group’, policy interventions should prioritise anti-corruption measures, regulatory quality and administrative capacity-building rather than focusing solely on technological infrastructure.