- Poster
Online Platforms and In-Person Public Services: Improving Citizen Trust, Satisfaction, and Uptake with New Public Sector Technologies
Salim Kombo
- July 12, 2024
- 7:49 am
BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
As governments around the world increasingly digitize , citizen-facing public services naturally follow. However, little research has directly compared the online and in-person modes of public service delivery, which hinders understanding of how digitization affects government-citizen interactions (Lindgren, Madsen, Hofmann, & Melin, 2019). We conduct a study in Kenya to consider how in-person and online service modes impact citizens’ trust in government and uptake of public services. Kenya is a context well suited to in-person versus online comparisons because the country’s in-person Huduma Centres and online eCitizen portal are widely used and offer many of the same government services.
THEMATIC AREAS
The result suggests that the two modes of service delivery serve different segments of the population, a finding with direct policy implications. It has been argued that governments’ responsibility to serve all citizens requires understanding the effects of service delivery modes on outcomes other than traditional metrics of program success like cost/benefit ratios (Kim et al., 2019). Since digitization of government services is all but inevitable (Epstein, 2022; UN DESA, 2022), and in some cases there is pressure to make services available only by electronic means (Tangi et al., 2021), our results suggest that phase out of in-person services may negatively affect the people who trust government the most—surely an unintended consequence of such pressure.