Innovation with information technology: coalition governments and emerging economies - fighting corruption with electronic governance

Coalition governments are becoming increasingly common in many countries with multi-party political systems. The coalition government experiences from countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa show that invariably some areas of public policy formulation and implementation gets adversely affected in varying degrees, as a result of coalition politics. Corruption is one such area. Research in this area found ample evidence that corruption levels in many developing and some developed countries increased with installation of coalition governments and consequently resulted in poor governance. Coalition governments have been found to shy away from serious efforts to fight or eliminate corruption, as this can threaten the stability or the very existence of these governments. Electronic governance (e-governance), in essence is provision of simple, moral, accountable, responsive and transparent (SMART) governance using information and communications technologies (ICTs). This study verifies our hypothesis that e-governance can eliminate or drastically reduce corruption, and can be an invaluable tool for developing and implementing effective public policy and good governance, even in countries with coalition governments.