eGovernment continues to expand in the Swedish welfare state. Sweden aims to “become world leader in harnessing the opportunities of digital transformation” (Government Offices of Sweden, 2017 p.1), and is highly ranked in indexes measuring digital development such as UN’s e-Government Development Index and EU’s Digital Society and Economy Index. Digital development is still partly understood as ‘neutral’ and ‘progressive’. However, previous research on eGovernment and related fields have highlighted that governmental policies, institutions, and services are embedded in ideological imaginaries, which challenges the idea of technology as being value-neutral and without ideology (Schuilenburg & Peeters, 2020; Hintz et al., 2019; Verdegem & Fuchs, 2013). Still fewer have focused on questions about what citizenship ideals are imagined and pursued based on ideological grounds of eGovernment. A recent literature overview (Chen et al. 2021) has found that there is a lack of critical perspectives in digital citizenship studies. However, Isin and Ruppert (2020) offer a critical conceptualization of digital citizenship, that challenges the dominating conceptualizations which focus on internet-usage (Mossberger et al. 2007) and digital literacy (Ribble, 2015). While Isin and Ruppert (2020) argue that digital citizens come to existence through imaginary, legal, and performative dimensions, Mejer (2012) brought to discussion the prospective of a new type of citizen-driven production of public benefits that would transcend the traditional state-led welfare structures.  

This paper answers to the call for more critical perspectives on digital citizenship, by identifying and unpacking the imagined ideals of digital citizenship in the Swedish digital welfare state. Inspired by Isin and Ruppert’s (2020) conceptualization, Laclau & Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory, and Schou and Hjelholt’s (2017) citizenship framing in the Danish context, this paper identifies and unpacks imagined citizen ideals by analysing imaginary, legal, and performative dimensions of the Swedish digital welfare state. Data for the imaginary dimension consists of the Swedish national digitalization strategy (Government Offices of Sweden, 2017). Data for the legal dimension consists of the Swedish Library Act (‘Bibliotekslag’ SFS 2019:961). Lastly, data for the performative dimension and imaginary dimension is gathered from 11 Swedish municipal libraries, including observations of daily citizen-interactions regarding digital issues collected in 2019, and interviews with library staff collected in 2022. Libraries are one of the primary public organizations which facilitate digital motivation, access, competence, and usage (van Dijk, 2020) in Sweden (Bernhard et al., 2019; Mersad, 2019), and where citizens are assisted in claiming their citizenship rights in a digital society (Gustafsson et al., 2020).  

This paper contributes to eGovernment and digital citizenship studies by investigating the Swedish case and by identifying and unpacking specific imagined ideals to move beyond digital citizenship as an “catch-all phrase to describe an ideal” (Becker, 2019). This paper also enables comparison with the Danish case, which both are characterized by the Nordic welfare state model but also vary in terms of approaches to digital transformation. The contribution is both empirical and theoretical by investigating the Swedish case and expanding critical conceptualizations of digital citizenship.