Browsing by Author "Maksimova, Mariia"

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Automated impact assessment - How digitizing government enables rapid and tailor-made policy responses
(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2022-09-14) Maksimova, Mariia; Alishani, Art; Solvak, Mihkel; Krimmer, Robert
As interest in the digital transformation of public administration grows, the main challenge remains to improve government governance systems and integrate a wider range of evidence into decisionmaking processes. The successful digitalization and application of such approaches improves the quality, responsiveness and flexibility of public administrations. The digialtization of processes has made it possible to use micro-level data to assess the impact of a policy or program and apply the feedback to improve the design and delivery of public services. Evidence-based policy-making evaluates programs based on their visible impacts. Large-scale data collected through digitized governance, coupled with econometric impact assessment, provides an ideal working toolkit for this. However, the current situation of European governments is one of slow adoption, as they are often slow to respond to new challenges. This is due to the static one-off impact assessment approaches used, the results of which quickly become outdated. With further digitalization, improvement of systems, and a rapidly changing situation, there is a need to speed up institutions’ ability to quickly draw working solutions to offset the effects of unexpected events in society and economy and react without delays if policy effects dissipate. This paper demonstrates how a high level of digitalization in government allows addressing such issues by automating causal impact assessment and making it a continuous part of the service delivery. The use case is an automated system for assessing active labour market policies in Estonia using individual-level data from government digital registers. Building on this, it shows how impact assessment automation depends on automatically generated data, only available due to the digitalization of other public services, and how versatile it is when it comes to proving casual evidence in a suddenly changing environment.
Civil society against stately cybercontrol: the case of Russia
(Tartu Ülikool, 2022) Maksimova, Mariia; Makarychev, Andrey, juhendaja; Fróis, Catarina, juhendaja; Tartu Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste valdkond; Tartu Ülikool. Johan Skytte poliitikauuringute instituut
This thesis investigates the Russian liberal civil society – a part of the Russian civil society that strives for a domestic socio-political change, democratization and liberalization of the current order – in cyberspace, where it must battle growing pressure from the state, seeking to control all dissent. I hypothesize that in its reaction to the stately cybercontrol, the liberal civil society develops cybersecurity practices that make it more potent and allow for a counteraction against the state. Hence, I use in-depth expert interviews and focus groups with representatives of the liberal civil society to collect the data for qualitative content analysis to analyze the research question. As a result, the thesis discovers a wide range of societal cybersecurity practices beyond defensive actions to include resistant components. Hence, I conclude that the Russian liberal civil society, although experiencing significant pressure that hinders its efficiency, can fight off the state’s attacks on it and continues to develop itself. The results of this study could be of value for viewing Russia not as a singular actor but as a context in which liberal powers are struggling against the authoritarian regime.
Data-Driven Personalized E-Government Services: Literature Review and Case Study
(Springer International Publishing, 2021-09-07) Maksimova, Mariia; Solvak, Mihkel; Krimmer, Robert
Better targeted and more personalized service offering to citizens has the potential to make state-citizen interactions more seamless, reduce inefficiencies in service provision, and lower barriers to service access for the less informed and disadvantaged social groups. What constitutes personalization and how the service offering can be customized to meet individual user demand is, however, much less clear and underdeveloped partially due to the technical and legal dependencies involved. The paper gives an overview of how personalization and customization of digital service offering have been discussed in the literature and systematizes the main strand emerging from this. It follows up with a case study of the Estonian X-road log data as one potential way to detect latent user demand emerging from an experienced life-event that could form a basis for letting users define their service needs as holistically as possible. The results show the existence of distinct service usage clusters, with specific user profiles behind them, a clear indication of latent demand that leads to a simultaneous consumption of otherwise independent digital services.
Modern democratic federations in the digital age: the conditions and prerequisites of electronic government (de-)centralization
(Tartu Ülikool, 2018) Maksimova, Mariia; Solvak, Mihkel, juhendaja; Tartu Ülikool. Sotsiaalteaduste valdkond; Tartu Ülikool. Johan Skytte poliitikauuringute instituut
This thesis discusses the process of administrative (de-)centralization of electronic government in 11 democratic federations. The research is comparative in nature and process-tracing was used as a primary data analysis method in order to identify the factors that led to the centralization or decentralization of the three electronic government areas. The following factors were discussed in the study: economic resources, the quality of public services, the quality of electronic government and the political orientation of the majority party in the parliament. The work not only analyzes the prerequisites for the actions of the central government regarding the electronic government system aimed at redistributing intergovernmental power-relations but also categorizes these actions in the context of redistribution of administrative powers. Based on the results of the study, the factors of centralization or decentralization of each electronic government area are highlighted, and the main strategies are outlined. As the thesis argues, the desire of federal center to improve the quality of public services and quality of electronic government leads to the decentralization of electronic services area with the centralization of electronic administration, while increasing of economic resources leads to greater centralization of both electronic administration and electronic services.