Building Citizen Trust towards E-Government Services: Do High Quality Websites Matter?

Abstract

E-governments are increasingly becoming a familiar fixture in virtual landscapes. Yet, the lack of citizen trust brought on by the novelty and uncertainty of online transactions has inhibited the widespread acceptance for public e-services. Ascribing to the perspective of technology as a social actor with whom the customer interacts and transacts, we put forward a research model that accentuates the pivotal role of e-government service quality as a salient driver of citizens' trustworthiness beliefs towards e-government Web sites, which in turn promotes the corresponding adoption of public e-services. E-government service quality, as conceptualized in this study, borrows from the popularized SERVQUAL constructs in deriving prescriptive design principles to guide the development of e-government Web sites. Data collected from a sample of 647 e-government service participants substantiates all 14 hypothesized relationships, thereby suggesting that high quality e- government Web sites do matter in building citizen trust towards public e-services.