Digital State Governance in Estonia and Poland: Institutional Architectures, Interoperability, and the Transition toward Proactive Public Services

Abstract

Digital transformation of public administration increasingly concerns not only the online availability of services but also the institutional architecture through which data, identity, interoperability, accountability, and service delivery are organised. Estonia and Poland provide analytically useful cases because both operate within the European Union regulatory environment while following different historical and organisational trajectories of state digitalisation. The study aims to identify and explain the principal differences between Estonian and Polish models of digital state governance and to determine the areas in which their current strategies are converging. The research applies a comparative institutional and conceptual analysis based on official national digital strategies, European Commission Digital Decade reports, OECD digital government assessments, and peer-reviewed research. The comparison is structured around seven dimensions: strategic governance, interoperability architecture, digital identity, service design, data governance and transparency, multilevel coordination and inclusion, and the integration of artificial intelligence. The analysis identifies Estonia as an infrastructure-led model in which secure digital identity, distributed registers, X-tee interoperability, and once-only data reuse form the institutional core of public service delivery. Poland has developed a service-consolidation model centred on national portals, mObywatel, sectoral digital services, and progressively stronger architectural and whole-of-government coordination. The 2026 Polish State Digitalisation Strategy explicitly moves toward once-only data reuse, common architectural standards, fully electronic case handling, and broader integration of key services. Estonia's 2035 digital society strategy advances from mature interoperability toward event-based services, data control, systemic AI use, and digital-state resilience. The comparison shows that digital government maturity should be analysed through the relationship between infrastructure, institutions, and service logic rather than through the number of e-services alone. Estonia and Poland increasingly converge on proactive, interoperable, and human-centred digital governance, but they approach this objective from different institutional starting points. Future studies should examine implementation at local-government level, cross-border interoperability, citizen trust, and the governance effects of AI-enabled public services.