The Introduction of Digital Public Administration Designs in the Andean Community of Nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru) Latin America: Failure or the Possibility of Saving Democracy?

Democracy in the states of Latin America is traditionally affected by a variety of negative factors such as corruption, nepotism, opacity of state power, lack of citizen’s involvement in the process of decision-making and public policy making, etc. At different times and in different countries, many ways have been proposed for overcoming the crisis of democracy, overcoming tendencies towards centralization of power. One of the latter is the introduction of technologies based on the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies into the political management process. This process is carried out in several stages and today we can say about the digitalization of public administration. Looking at this process in the context of democracy, researchers talk about electronic or digital democracy. It is worth noting that the use of digital technologies in public administration and the digitalization of public administration itself can be considered as an element of democracy, allowing citizens not only to receive information about the work of the government, making it more transparent, but also to be involved in the democratic process, representing their interests and influencing process of policy making and decision making. This article is aimed at studying the designs for implementing digital governance (the state as a platform) in the Andean Community of Nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru). A neoinstitutional methodology and comparative method are implemented. As an expected result of the study, it is planned to get a picture of the practice of implementing digital management in the indicated group of countries with the use of the general methodology of comparative research. As a result, it is planned to reinforce or refute the thesis about the positive impact of the introduction of digital governance on the level of democratization in Latin America. This will make it possible to draw more general conclusions about the situation with the digitalization of public administration in developing countries, to reveal the characteristic features of digitalization of the aforementioned group of countries, as well as to identify problems directly generated by digitalization. The region of Latin America was not accidentally chosen as the object of study due to the high level of urbanization and the spread of the Internet in the region. Thus, the proposed study is indicative in the context of solving the problem of assessing the democratization of public administration in the Latin America region, allowing us to draw a picture of the current state of digital governance implementation through the study of the implementation designs for the concept of “state as a platform”, to reveal the characteristics of both individual countries and subregions Latin American features of digitalization of public administration, contributing to building knowledge about the democratization of political regimes countries and political processes of a democratic nature taking place in the countries of the so-called “third wave of democratization”.