Literature review

Extant literature has explored the factors affecting citizens’ usage of e-participation services. The work of Nam (2011) for instance, empirically investigated citizen’s attitude on open governments as well as government 2.0. His work indicated that the attitude of citizens could to large extent, be influenced by the various services that are both enabled as well as advanced application of new technologies in the implementation of government operations.

According to Nye et al., (1997) citizens may be affected by services that are offered via new technology offerings and implemented for government operations. Other empirical studies have explored the perception and attitude of citizens’ towards-government services in terms of values, trust and satisfaction. These studies have identified a big gap between the perceived government performance and public expectations (Peters, 2009). This underlines the need for actual government performance as the notion of performance only leads to heightened expectations among the citizens. Welch et al (2005) noted that the public perception-expectations gap could effectively lead to a reduction in the public trust in e-government services.

According to the work of Tolbert and Mossberger (2003), the manner in which citizens perceive their government appears abstract concerning conceptual validity as well as measurability. With a consideration of such a limitation, a series of prior studies have employed and developed quite effective strategies for quantifying or measuring citizens’ attitudes and perception towards e-participation. Tolbert and Mossberger (2003) further noted that empirical studies can be conducted n order to determine citizens’ view as well as used of e-government services. This is done by evaluating their perceptions, trust, efficacy, satisfaction and confidence. The authors also noted that while performing such studies, a lot of attention must be placed on socio-demographic to reveal the actual impact of e-participation on various segments of the entire population (Niehaves & Becker, 2008; West, 2004).

The work of Davis (1989) employed Technology Acceptance Model as a conceptual framework for use in conducting empirical investigations into people’s perception of usefulness of usefulness of e-government services. The actually aim was to investigate their perception of the value of e-government services. The influence of e-government or e-participation on their satisfactions is what has often been investigated (Kolsaker & Lee-Kelley, 2008). The works of Carter and Bélanger (2005) and Wangpipatwong et al., (2008) on the other hand investigated the effect of continuous engagement in e-participation on the attitude of users about adoption of e-participation services. On the contrary, the work of Alsaghier et al. (2009) investigated the opposite of e-participation’s perceived usefulness. They investigated the perceived risk of e-participation as well as the motivation for using such services. Wu and Chen (2005) however, carried out an empirical inquiry into trust issue as an important determinant of behavioral intention to engage in e-participations services. Their investigation concentrated on on-line tax return system and employed extension of the Trust and TAM model with TPB in the first-time adoption of on-line tax registration system.

A series of investigations revealed that frequent engagement in e-participation services has a great impact on citizens’ trust in government. It pretty much has similar effect on their attitudes and perceptions towards e-participation (Kolsaker & Lee-Kelley, 2008; Tolbert & Mossberger, 2003). These studies also indicated that technological factors must be considered when investigating the perception and attitude of citizens towards e-participation. The disparity in the extent of internet usage among the entire socio-demographic spectrum creates a great digital divide that in essence, is a fundamental source of impedance of citizens’ use and adoption of e-participation services. Digital divide is in this case a factor that can influence citizens’ attitude towards e-participation (Wu and Chen , 2005). Initial adoption of e-participation services is an important factor in the determination of their influence and future/continued usage.

More recently, Aladwani (2013) came up with an alternative model of citizens’ attitudes toward e-participation. In what he referred to as a contingency model, he explored the effects of demographics and quality characteristics of relationships on the connection existing between citizen attitudes towards e-participation. His work also evaluated the level of e-participation acceptance. His work employed statistical analyses of specific responses from 268 respondents in order to uncover several important findings. His study exposed the relationship between e-participation attitudes and frequency of visits and how these differed by gender and level of education. The level of trust in these e-participation services was noted to play a strong role in the moderation of relationship between the attitudes and total number of executed transactions.It is quite clear that several factors play a role in the determination of citizens’ attitude towards e-participations. These is exemplified in the work of Kolsaker and Lee-Kelley (2008). In their work, they investigated UK Citizens’ attitudes towards e-participation (e-governance and e-government). The findings indicated that while e-participation is quite low, citizens appreciate user-friendliness, personalization of the services as well as capacity to communicate. Users as well as non-users are indicated in their study to have moderate value in e-participation for communication and knowledge acquisitions and very little value of its democratic engagement.

It is important for e-participation adoption process to be smooth and seamless. The work of Shareef et al (2010) investigates the critical factors that allow citizens adopt e-participation services.They noted that

First, technology adoption model (TAM), theory of planned behavior (TPB) and diffusion of innovation theory (DOI) cannot be used to capture as well as specify the whole essence of e-participation adoption behaviors among citizens. Other than that, they revealed that e-participation adoption behavior differs by service maturity levels.

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