DIGITAL GOVERNANCE AND TRUST IN MOLDOVA'S EU ACCESSION PROCESS

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between digital governance, institutional trust and accession readiness in the Republic of Moldova. It addresses a specific problem in accession monitoring: legal alignment, platform availability and service counts may be recorded without showing whether digital public services improve administrative experience. The purpose is to derive a trust-sensitive analytical model for Moldova rather than to test a statistical hypothesis. The study uses qualitative policy-document analysis and conceptual synthesis on a corpus of 24 source items, including Moldovan policy documents, European Commission enlargement documents, multilateral administrative assessments, interoperability and cybersecurity sources, election-observation materials and scholarly literature. Manual deductive coding applied five categories: strategic alignment, service quality, accountability, institutional capacity and inclusion. The findings show that Moldova's digital agenda is increasingly embedded in accession-related state-building, while evidence remains stronger for service availability and infrastructure than for user experience, complaint resolution or segmented satisfaction. The article proposes a trust-through-servicequality model and argues that assisted access and cyber-resilience should be treated as constitutive dimensions of public service quality. The contribution is conceptual and measurement-oriented, and requires future empirical testing.