The path dependency of national electronic identities A comparison of innovation processes in four European countries

This paper compares the four national electronic Identity Management Systems (eIDMS), which have been described in the previous chapters. The section “Similarities and differences between four national eIDMS” will highlight thedifferences between these systems conceived as socio-technical systems with regardto the eID itself, the eID cards as tokens, the authentication processes as well as theprocedures for distribution and personalisation, the support provided for installingthe technology and any provider-related regulation. The section “A three-fold pathdependency”, according to the conceptual framework presented in the introductorychapter to this special issue, compares the new electronic systems with the previousones in each country, in order to assess the continuation or changes with regard tothe organisational, technological and regulatory path of development. The followingsections explain the differences between the paths chosen and the path-relatedchanges by analysing the actor constellation of the institutional actors, in particularthe policy field and the power structure, as well as the context in which the policymakers made their choices, looking at privacy and “Staatsverständnis” in particular. Finally the diffusion and usage of the eID function will be compared and analysed, discussing to what extent the new institution has made a contribution to solving thepolicy problem it was developed for, e.g. providing a stronger authentication in orderto meet security concerns regarding e-government and e-commerce transactions andavoiding new privacy infringements. Using grounded theory, the explanationsprovided have the status of generalisations derived from the four cases. They have tobe considered as hypotheses, which will be checked for other countries in thefollowing papers of this special issue. The comparison of the four cases in this articleshows a high degree of path dependency. Most of the differences between the newsystems are just a continuation of differences between the previous systems althoughthey are to solve the same problem and can draw on the same technologies. But mostastonishing is the finding that these differences between the systems do not influencediffusion and use of the eID function in the respective countries.