How does digital technology empower rural governance? Evidence from China

Digital technologies are widely expected to address governance challenges arising from urbanization and rural decline, especially in developing countries. Yet their practical contributions and mechanisms at the village scale remain under-specified, owing to the patchy application of digital technologies in rural governance and scarce village-level data. Grounded in a socio-technical systems (STS) perspective, we conceptualize digital technology as a subsystem interacting with the rural social subsystem. Using household survey data from 365 respondents in 19 villages across suburban Shanghai, China, we distinguish digital hardware from digital software and examine how they empower rural governance, estimating two-level hierarchical linear models (HLM) with farmers nested within villages. Results show that digital technologies improve rural governance performance through both direct and indirect pathways: demand matching mediates the effect of digitalization, while collective leadership and face-to-face mechanisms amplify it. We also find functional divergence: digital hardware is more salient for short-term, tangible challenges, whereas software is the key driver of long-term, transformative changes. Policy should therefore promote coordinated development of digital hardware and software and strengthen the synergy between digital tools and traditional governance, shifting from “connectivity built” to “adoption and routinized use” to maximize digital empowerment in rural governance.