E-government Performance in the EU: Does Trust Matter?

Abstract

Digitalization of daily life of citizens, businesses and state institutions has also incentivized transformation of the ways how governments interact with their citizens. However, despite considerable changes in functioning of front- and back-offices of governments and public administrations, the actual usage of e-services remains low. The latter leads to poor e- government performance at the country level, and this paper is aimed at explaining the role of trust as a factor contributing to it. Following recent updates of technology acceptance model and other frameworks derived from the theory of reasoned action, this research applies a time-series cross-sectional analysis to study the EU member states over the last nine years. The results show that in contrast to our expectations, the role of trust in the Internet and trust in government cannot be explicitly confirmed, whereas users' behaviour tends to be the dominant factor in explaining e-government performance at the aggregate level. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)