Digital Transformation, Discursive Silence, and Administrative Capacity

• In Event: Digital Transformation in Government:  Policy Diffusion, Administrative Capacity, and Discretion

Abstract

Digital transformation has become a defining ambition of contemporary public administration, with governments across Europe framing digital reform as a pathway to innovation, coordination, and improved service delivery. Yet ambitious digital agendas often exceed the administrative capacity required for implementation. This gap matters for policy because governments may appear digitally prepared on paper while lacking the organizational conditions needed to deliver reform in practice. This paper asks: How do policy narratives shape perceptions of administrative readiness for digital transformation, and what role does discursive silence play in producing implementation gaps? While existing research often explains weak implementation through institutional design, resources, or technical capability, this paper argues that digital transformation is also governed through policy discourse. In particular, governments frequently emphasize innovation, modernization, and strategic commitment while remaining comparatively silent about coordination problems, institutional bottlenecks, staff capabilities, and accountability arrangements. This discursive silence matters because it can overstate readiness and reduce the visibility of implementation constraints. The analysis draws on the Horizon Europe RADAR project corpus and examines policy strategies, legislative documents, and evaluation reports from five European countries: Estonia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Romania, and Italy. The research design combines natural language processing (NLP) with theory-informed qualitative analysis to identify recurring patterns in how governments frame digital transformation and how these framings relate to implementation conditions across cases. Preliminary findings identify three broad configurations of digital governance discourse: transformational narratives centered on systemic innovation; managerial-adaptive narratives emphasizing coordination and incremental adjustment; and aspirational or compliance-driven narratives that stress formal alignment more than operational preparedness. Across these configurations, discursive silence recurs in the limited specification of implementation risks, institutional bottlenecks, and accountability mechanisms. Cases dominated by aspirational or compliance-driven narratives appear more likely to display a wider gap between digital ambition and administrative readiness than cases in which managerial and coordination challenges are more explicitly acknowledged. The paper argues that implementation gaps in digital government are not only a product of resources or institutional design, but also of how reform is framed and governed. By linking policy narratives and discursive silence to administrative capacity, the paper contributes to research on digital governance and offers a framework for evaluating digital transformation beyond formal commitments and technology adoption alone.

Author

• Diana Camelia Iancu, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration
  Presenting Author