Government technological capacity and public–private partnerships regarding digital service delivery: evidence from Chinese cities

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.