Institutional Trust and E-government Adoption in the Eu: a Cross-national Analysis

It has been argued that e-government adoption lags behind compared to e-commerce and empirical research points out that Europeans are often unwilling or reluctant to engage to egovernment. This paper adopts a neo-institutional perspective and attempts to shed light on some of the underlying factors of this behaviour by examining the political nature of egovernment. More specifically, this research examines the role of institutional trust in egovernment adoption while mapping the patterns of e-government adoption in the EU. Methodologically, sequential triangulation is the adopted method of study, and both a crossnational and a longitudinal analysis of the e-government adoption levels are performed. Egovernment and e-commerce usage levels are analysed in parallel in order to highlight the factors that lead in the observed differences. The analysis shows that e-government in Europe often follows paradoxical adoption patterns that cannot be explained by the existing, individual-level, studies. In contrast, this paper adopts a national-level perspective and it analyses technology adoption through the lenses of a neo-institutional theoretical framework. The research findings show that confidence in government and public institutions have a significant impact on citizens’ attitudes towards e-government. Accordingly, the observed differences in the EU are, to a large extent, explained by the different levels of institutional trust.