Relationship between e-Government development and state capacity in Brazilian municipalities: a cluster and correspondence analysis

This paper seeks to understand the relationship between state capacity and ICT usage dimensions. Local governments are responsible for delivering services and are highly impacted by their social, economic, and regional characteristics. For the quality and quantity of their services, governments need to have state capacity, that is, the ability to plan, execute, and evaluate their policies. In the same way, governments need to be able to use information and communications technology (ICT) to aid and improve their results. Based on statistical, cluster, and correspondence analysis methods of secondary data, our results show that most local governments have state capacity and ICT usage but lack sophistication. At the same time, a small group performs worse on both dimensions. The correspondence analysis evidences a strong correlation between state capacity and e-gov development at the local level. The results show that municipalities with greater technical-administrative and political-relational capacity are more advanced in e-gov.