Inequalities in digital welfare take-up: lessons from e-government in Spain

ABSTRACT

E-government offers opportunities for improving the interactions between citizens, governmental and public institutions, private sector organizations, and public employees. Despite this, the take-up of e-government services has been vastly uneven in many societies with considerable digital divides existing. This study identifies the determinants of use of e-government in Spain through an analysis of the Survey on Equipment and Use of information and Communication Technologies in Households. A Path Analysis Model was used to identity the variables that explain why almost half of the Spanish population does not make use of E-government and how these variables are related. Two large groups of variables were found to be important: digital skills and trust in the Internet. Digital skills were affected by an individual citizens’ resources, such as their educational level and economic resources, as well as by age and gender. Meanwhile, their trust in the Internet was shaped by other attitudes and beliefs – mainly their concern about being targeted by advertising. These findings have important consequences for the design of policies to address digital inclusion across Europe and elsewhere, which need to focus on building citizen's trust.

KEYWORDS:

• E-government
• digital inequalities
• participatory digital divide
• cyber-exclusion
• e-government

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Specifically, our independent variable will be, as will be explained in the empirical section of this article, people who, despite a need to, choose not to send documentation (forms or other types of documents) to the public service using the Internet. Although throughout this article we will offer information on other forms of online interaction with the public service, our analysis will focus on the aforementioned behaviour. We have focused on people who do not send documents online to the public service because these types of E-government services use require greater digital skills as well as an increased digital effort by users.

2 This Index is built on three sub-indices: the index of online services, the index of technological infrastructures and the index of human capital. For more information, see United Nations (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología.

Notes on contributors

José Manuel Robles

José Manuel Robles is a full professor in the Department of Applied Sociology of the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology of the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). He is an expert in digital political communication and analysis of social processes through advanced statistical techniques.

Cristobal Torres-Albero

Cristobal Torres-Albero is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). Prof. Torres-Albero is an expert in Information Society, sociology of science and digital inequalities.

Guillermo Villarino

Guillermo Villarino is a researcher in the Department of Statistics and Data Science of the Faculty of Statistical Studies of the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). He is a specialist in Machine Learning and information processing for decision-making in the field of Supervised Classification.