Abstract

The digital transition suggests a paradigm shift for the public sector: new institutional arrangements as well as new cultural codes. The real challenge for the so-called platform bureaucracy is therefore a «connection» strategy with the social demand for public innovation, to enhance the potential for modernization that digital transition involves, but without yielding to the logic of populism. The public sector digital transition is undoubtedly achieving promising results for administrative processes in terms of efficiency and institutional rationality. Far beyond the triumphalism proposed by a certain neo-liberal rhetoric, a few critical aspects still persist, first with regard to the effect that the digital transition is having on one of the significant problems that besets the public sector: public corruption. Are we really overcoming, via digital transition, the paradigm of classical bureaucratic legitimacy? Is a new digital rationality for administration leading to a convergence, on both the supply and demand sides of administration, on a new digital rationality undermining bureaucratic particularism? In short, how is the digital transition impacting on public corruption? The paper seeks to answer these questions by addressing the area of administrative transparency – between publicity and social accountability – in the Italian public sector. After an assessment of the scholarship, it tries to outline a framework for the effects of the digital transition on corruption, using as a case-study the new forms of digital governance within the tax control agencies