Abstract
Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractDigital government is advancing worldwide while foreign investment contracts and becomes more selective, making it a first-order policy question whether e-government can attract capital without strong formal institutions. The study aims to establish whether the investment payoff of digital government depends on the rule of law in 15 post-Soviet economies, separating the within-country and between-country dimensions of this relationship over 2008–2024. A biennial panel aligned to the nine UN E-Government Survey waves (135 country-wave cells; baseline N = 120) is estimated with two-way fixed effects, a within-between specification that tests each dimension separately, an EGDI × Rule of Law interaction, wild cluster bootstrap inference, and a robustness battery of seventeen alternative specifications. Within countries, no complementarity is found. The interaction equals –0.191 (SE = 0.447, bootstrap p = 0.690, bootstrap 95% CI from –1.616 to 0.742), and the marginal effect of a one–standard–deviation EGDI increase is insignificant at every rule-of-law level (–0.979 to –1.481 percentage points of GDP). Between countries, the level association is null as well; the between-country slope equals –1.083 (bootstrap p = 0.692). The only conditional structure is exploratory and substitution-signed, an interaction of –2.619 outside the EU members (bootstrap p = 0.013) that does not survive correction for multiple specifications (Holm-adjusted p = 0.226). Digital government offers no detectable investment premium at either level.