Civic engagement with traditional government and mobile government: comparing rural to urban citizens in Saudi Arabia

Mobile devices have added new channels for the communication between governments and citizens. The new nature of engagement between government and citizens through mobile devices needs to be studied intensively in order to make it more effective. Thus, this research examines the relationship between mobile government (M-government) and civic engagement deeply. In particular, it compares civic engagement with traditional government (Tgovernment) to civic engagement with M-government in order to determine if M-government increases civic engagement. Furthermore, it compares civic engagement of urban citizens to civic engagement of rural citizens in the case of T-government and in the case of Mgovernment. This dissertation used structured questionnaires and semi-structured interviews as the major methodologies. Our results revealed highly significant evidence for the increase in civic engagement with M-government compared to T-government. Moreover, the results indicated that M-government allows similar levels of civic engagement between urban and rural citizens. However, the results did not detect significant difference between civic engagement of urban and rural citizens with T-government. However, the major finding of this dissertation is that Saudi citizens believe that Human-to-Computer interaction is more effective than Human-to-Human interaction for their communication with government.