Although an increasing number of studies analyze the UN E-Government Index, shortcomings concerning the data and its analysis remain. Firstly, the influence of regime type is usually being tested with gradual measures of democratization. Using a qualitative regime threshold, the present paper does not find a democracy advantage in e-government performance. Secondly, there is a lack of methodological clarity, since most authors overlook that e-government websites are coded in the year prior to the index’s release. Testing causal assumptions is imprecise without proper time lags or nonsensical, e.g. when the dependent variable is coded in 2011 but the independent variables in 2012. Thirdly, the index does not display governance outcomes. It measures government outputs, which are in all models tested here, contingent upon a country’s political integration into the globalization and thus the diffusion of political ideas. The good performance of autocracies could imply window-dressing and not necessarily good governance.
