Placing the Effect? Gleaning Insights into the Relationship between Citizens’ Use of E-Government and Trust in Government

Abstract

The effects of e-government on citizens’ trust in government are unclear. This study intends to address this lack of clarity by proposing a novel conceptual framework that can be used to explicate the processes tying e-government use to trust in government. This framework is centred upon citizens’ propensity to trust, perceptions of public sector performance, and trust in government. Citizens’ use of e-government is then argued to strengthen relationships in this framework. The validity of this framework is tested using data collected in 2012 from citizens of Seoul, South Korea. In general, the results offer partial support for the proposed framework. However, the strength of e-government’s influence decreases with more frequent use of information coming from government websites. Implications for effective practice are discussed.

Key words:

• Trust in government
• e-government
• ICT
• perceptions of public sector performance

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Location refers to the local administrative district of Seoul that a panel member lives in. There are twenty-five local administrative districts in Seoul.

2 Completing the survey in less than 5 per cent of the allotted time means that the respondent completed the survey in 85 s. The average time to complete the survey was 25 min. Therefore, completing the survey so quickly implied that respondents did not carefully read the items before responding.

3 Response patterns in surveys refer to surveys were respondents selected the same answer (e.g. 5) for all of the items, or where answers demonstrated ascending and/or descending patterns (e.g. 5-4-3-2-1).

4 The items were modified in order to ensure there was no redundancy when translated in to Korean.

5 The WVS uses a single item from this scale, while the ESS and CID use all three items.

6 While this value is lower than the conventional threshold in the social sciences of 0.7, the Rosenberg scale is a standard in measuring social trust. Research by Zmerli and Newton (2008) found the Rosenberg Scale to possess an adequate level of reliability across various European nations, though they did observe a degree of variation across European nations, with culture likely contributing toward such variation. Drawing on the findings of Zmerli and Newton, one explanation for the Cronbach alpha of 0.61 is South Korea’s Confucian culture. Nevertheless, irrespective of the Cronbach alpha for the measure of social trust used in this study, the Rosenberg Scale is generally considered to possess the highest face validity among the different methods of measuring social trust.

7 Due to concerns over averaging items in order to measure latent constructs of trust in government, propensity to trust, perceptions of public sector performance, and e-government use, we ran the same regression models where the latent constructs were measured using principal component factoring. These results were nearly identical to those in the text.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [NRF-2014S1A3A2044898].