Original version
International Review of Administrative Sciences. 2023, 89 (1), 95-111, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-023-00723-3
Abstract
Governments have increased their collaboration with the private sector regarding public service delivery, and their propensities to do so are largely shaped by their own in-house capacities. In this article, we theorize and analyze whether governments with an extremely low or extremely high technological capacity are more likely to collaborate with third-party platforms in order to jointly provide digital services. We expect there to be a U-shaped relationship between the technological capacity of those governments and their public–private partnership choices. An empirical analysis of digital service delivery across 290 prefecture-level cities in China corroborates this hypothesis. These results deepen our understanding of the competing motivations that drive the public–private partnership process.