The path dependency of national electronic identities

Abstract

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 the differences between these systems conceived as socio-technical systems with regard to the eID itself, the eID cards as tokens, the authentication processes as well as the procedures for distribution and personalisation, the support provided for installing the technology and any provider-related regulation. The section "A three-fold path dependency", according to the conceptual framework presented in the introductory chapter to this special issue, compares the new electronic systems with the previous ones in each country, in order to assess the continuation or changes with regard to the organisational, technological and regulatory path of development. The following sections explain the differences between the paths chosen and the path-related changes by analysing the actor constellation of the institutional actors, in particular the policy field and the power structure, as well as the context in which the policy makers 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 the policy problem it was developed for, e.g. providing a stronger authentication in order to meet security concerns regarding e-government and e-commerce transactions and avoiding new privacy infringements. Using grounded theory, the explanations provided have the status of generalisations derived from the four cases. They have to be considered as hypotheses, which will be checked for other countries in the following papers of this special issue. The comparison of the four cases in this article shows a high degree of path dependency. Most of the differences between the new systems are just a continuation of differences between the previous systems although they are to solve the same problem and can draw on the same technologies. But most IDIS (2010) 3:111-153

Different countries-different paths extended comparison of the introduction of eIDs in eight European countries

“…However we cannot explain the different regulation regarding the use of the National register or Social Security Number between Denmark and Finland on the one hand and Sweden and Estonia on the other, as a reaction to stronger privacy concerns, as we did with regard to the differences between Austria and Germany vis a vis Belgium and Spain (see Kubicek and Noack 2010). Rather, it could be the reverse: Finnish citizens perceive a high level of personal data protection and therefore have few general concerns regarding data privacy.…”

The Limits of Control – (Governmental) Identity Management from a Privacy Perspective

“…This is one explanation for European e-IDMS having several differences regarding technical design and privacy features [5], whereas the latter are "by no means universally implemented" [18]. Although privacy-enhanced techniques for public key infrastructure (PKI) have already existed for several years, these techniques have scarcely been adopted in mainstream applications and e-ID card schemes [18].…”

Introduction: conceptual framework and research design for a comparative analysis of national eID Management Systems in selected European countries

“…In these four cases the reader will encounter big differences on almost all components. In a first comparative analysis we will depict the differences in the four eIDMS, examine how these can be explained by the conceptual framework presented here, and derive a set of generalizations across the four cases (Kubicek and Noack 2010a). As we cannot be sure that the four cases cover the whole range of eIDMS being introduced in the European Community these days, four other cases studies will follow, which are not based on personal interviews but on documents and which will explicitly refer to some of the generalisations proposed (Hoff and Hoff 2010, Rissanen 2010, Grönlund 2010, Martens 2010.…”