says that the majority of the MENA countries, with still relatively low levels of Digitalization, are expected to gain much in terms of Participation by intensifying the digitalization of their economies. However, although Digitalization has a number of benefits, notably in terms of improving citizens' political awareness, reaching a significant level of Participation in MENA takes more than simply intensively digitalizing the economy. Indeed, beyond the threshold level of Digitalization (0.57), its investment return in terms of improving Participation diminishes. In contrast, in OECD countries with more mature economies and democratic regimes that have already enjoyed most of the beneficial digitalization-driven effects on participation, the results rather show a -shaped relationship. This could have been expected as this organization mostly includes developed countries with such high levels of Digitalization that UU for it to significantly improve Participation it has to go beyond the threshold level of 0.78.<sup>57</sup> In the OECD data we found that, over the 2007-2020 period, a significant fraction of 47% of the countries included in the sample has reached a three-year lagged level of Digitalization less than this threshold.<sup>58</sup> These results suggest that 18 out of 38 OECD countries need to step up their effort to further digitalize their economies so that digitalization becomes participationbeneficial.

Third, Table 14 shows that the effect of Provision on Participation in MENA remains negative and significant even when one controls for digitalization. Similarly, the effect of Protection is still positive and significant. Against this backdrop, a point that is worth examining is whether, when we control for digitalization, the negative influence of Provision on Participation in MENA is lower than that obtained when digitalization is not controlled for. Table 16 helps to answer this question by comparing the estimations without and with as a control variable. For a better interpretation of the results, this table reports elasticities. DDiiDDiiffvvrr We see that when digitalization is not controlled for, a 1% increase in Provision in MENA reduces Participation by 0.54%. However, when digitalization is included, the reduction of Participation reduces to 0.44%. Both elasticities are significant at the 1% level.

> 57 A few words of caution are warranted before drawing conclusions from the tempting comparison that the reader might rightly do between the 0.78 threshold of the U-shaped effect of Digitalization found in the OECD data and the 0.57 threshold of the inversely U-shaped effect found in the MENA data. Indeed, while in the OECD data, the minimum level of Digitalization is equal to 0.48, in the MENA data it is equal to only 0.03. Thus, the threshold levels represent 163% and 1900% of these minimum levels in respectively OECD and MENA. Hence, despite the fact that the threshold level beyond which digitalization becomes participation-beneficial in OECD is higher than the threshold level beyond which it becomes participation-detrimental in MENA, it takes much more time, effort, and investment for a MENA country than for an OECD country to reach the respective threshold. This suggests that digitalization has bright days ahead of it in terms of being an effective instrument to enhance participation in MENA.

> 58 These countries are Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, and Türkiye.

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