Round Table “New directions in the study of digital transformation in governance”

Dr., prof. Trent Engbers, an associate professor of political science and public administration at the University of Southern Indiana and master of public administration director, made a presentation on the topic: “Guardians of the Digital Galaxy: Transforming governance”. Digital transformation in governance is revolutionizing public administration by integrating advanced hardware like internet of things sensors and software such as AI and blockchain to enhance efficiency and transparency. These technologies promise to improve customer service and personalize public services, although they bring significant privacy and accountability challenges. This lecture will offer some New directions in digital governance and how to effectively prepare for their management.

Dr., prof. Ricardo Correa Gomez, Adjunct Professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, talked about “Experimental Research in Public Administration Journals: a systematic literature review”. Experimental research has been published in public administration journals since 1980. The journal that has published the most articles is Public Administration Review, followed very closely by JPART. In terms of types of experimental research, we found Laboratory, Field, Survey, Quasi Natural and Conjoint. The most used type is the survey. It is worth mentioning that the survey’s experimental research has had exponential growth in the last ten years, while the others present a linear progression.

Dr., prof. Andrey Akhremenko, Leading Research Fellow at the International Laboratory for Digital Transformation in Public Administration of the International Laboratory of Digital Transformation in Public Administration, made a presentation on the topic “Investigating attitudes towards personal digital data collection as an indicator of trust in government: an online experimental approach”. He and his co-author assessed the role of political trust in shaping citizens' attitudes towards e-government practices for working with personal data. In this study we implemented an online experiment approach which consisted of two parts. As for the first step, a survey was conducted in order to gather the pre-treatment level of respondents’ trust as well as their sociodemographic characteristics. The next step was to apply the vignette research methodology: 192 randomly assigned hypothetical situations about personal data processing practices were used as a treatment to measure the attitudes. Despite the fact that the negative attitude of citizens towards the collection and processing of their personal data was confirmed, the assessment of such digital practices was positively influenced by the respondent's ideas about the "good intentions" of the state, potentially reflecting one of the "deeper" levels of political trust.

Dr., Associate Professor Anna Sanina, Leading Research Fellow at the International Laboratory for Digital Transformation in Public Administration of the International Laboratory of Digital Transformation in Public Administrationmade a presentation: “Level Up: Using Gamification to Integrate ESG Goals in Digital Government Education”. The presentation examines how gamification could be used for civil servant education concerning digital government transformation and ESG goals. A pilot study evaluated to what extent Public Administration students would find it effective to use self-study, human-partnered learning, and AI-powered teaching through a game-based online system. The results demonstrate the interesting finding of an increased participation rate on top of better performance as far as AI-driven education is concerned.

The speakers answered questions from the audience, in particular, Maria Yudina, Senior Research Fellow of the International Laboratory of Digital Transformation in Public Administration, asked about Ricardo Correa Gomez about possible reasons of surge in the number of publications with experiments in public administration. Niyaz Safiullin, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Agricultural Production Management at the Kazan State Agrarian University, clarified with the same speaker which experiments he considers the most suitable for evaluating the activities of civil servants. Laboratory tests are often expensive, therefore, according to the data given by Ricardo, they are less than others. Quasi-experimental studies are empirical interventional studies to assess the causal effect of an intervention on a target population group without random distribution. Field research is in third place in popularity (in terms of the number of publications), reviews are in second place, but various surveys are the leader. Eran Vigoda-Gadot, being one of R. Gomez's co-authors in this study, replied that he also considers survey methods more suitable for evaluating the activities of civil servants.

Alexandra Sidorova, an Associate Professor of the Department of Theory and Methodology of Public and Municipal Administration at the Faculty of Public Administration of Lomonosov Moscow State University, in response to Andrey Akhremenko's report, noted that a possible reason for the different levels of trust of citizens in the processing of different types of personal data by the state may be due to the possibility of using this data by third parties.

Evgeny Styrin noted the readiness of the International Laboratory for Digital Transformation in Public Administration of the Higher School of Economics to cooperate with foreign colleagues, including in the form of joint publications – the application of the research methodology developed in Russia in Israel, Brazil and other countries. Eran Vigoda-Gadot stressed the need to explore new directions in the field of digital transformation of public administration, and called for greater participation of young scientists in this work.