Digital state spaces: state rescaling and advanced digitalization

Abstract

ABSTRACTOver the past decades, advanced capitalist states have increasingly used digital technologies to deliver state services and restructure public sector institutions. This practice has had profound institutional as well as political consequences. So far, however, little research has been conducted that examines the forms of statehood and governance to which the use of digital technologies gives rise. To fill this research gap, this paper examines governmental digitalization through the lens of political economies of state rescaling. In doing so, it engages with the production of state spatiality, ultimately advancing the concept of digital state spaces, which links scholarship on state restructuring with work in digital geography. Drawing on several years of empirical research, the paper demonstrates the connection between these fields with an in-depth case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark, a country that is often cited as an example of a highly digitalized European state. It traces how national policy efforts have created new digital state spaces in Denmark and examines the local consequences these state interventions have had. Taken together, these conceptual and empirical insights contribute to a more nuanced understanding of governmental digitalization as a regulatory instrument implicated in the production of new spaces of governance.