Accountability for Digital Dreamers: Patterns of Failed Digitalization Initiatives

Abstract

To contribute to digitalization and accountability research, this study adopted a pattern arising from failure due to weak accountability that was initially identified in Great Britain. This was done to investigate if the pattern reappeared in digitalization initiatives at the Swedish municipal level. Attempting to answer this, the present study structured a survey sent to every municipality in Sweden, resulting in a response rate of 40.4%. It was not possible to statistically claim that the pattern repeated itself in the chosen context, making this study’s main contribution to stress that there might be a pattern as an effect due to weak accountability, without any knowledge of how this pattern presents itself.