Abstract
The digital transformation of local public administrations’ service delivery is analysed from the citizens’ perspective, comparing their expectations, actual use and satisfaction. Combining several datasets from the case of German local government for secondary analysis, the results show that the expectations are much higher than the actual availability of e-services. In particular the younger and higher educated citizens show greater levels of disappointment when using these services, being more open to using e-services. While the older users are quite satisfied with what they get, the younger generation are mostly highly unsatisfied and frustrated with the available e-services. For a future outlook, this topic should be prioritised much more, especially with the demographic change and the increase of high expectations.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter is related to a study conducted in cooperation with the German Hans-Böckler foundation, examining the status quo in German local one-stop shops (Bogumil et al. 2019). See also Kuhlmann and Bogumil in this volume.
- 2.
Especially the most-used services concerning childcare, birth, migration, marriage, social welfare are organised on local level (Hunnius et al. 2015). Larger services not provided by the local governments are tax administration and distribution of unemployment assistance.
- 3.
Two samples are taken from datasets of online surveys conducted by the private opinion research institute Civey, kindly provided for this chapter (“Civey 1602”, n = 5041; “Civey 1334”, n = 043). The used samples contain both a standard error of 2.5 per cent. The third dataset is taken from the citizen survey (via mail) in the city of Karlsruhe in 2018 with a random sample of 6000 citizens and a response rate of 20 per cent (Schwab et al. 2019, pp. 17–20) with n = 1054–1900. The fourth dataset was provided by the German Federal Statistical Office (Statistisches Bundesamt) about the satisfaction of citizens with the use of public service delivery (“Lebenslagenbefragung 2018”; n = 8761), which is a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI)-survey from the year 2018.
- 4.
The effect is significant, if the confidence interval does not contain one—which is the case in all of the variables. The logistic regression was made with the following dummy variables (yes/no), which means an odds ratio higher than one equals an overrepresentation and a lower result than 1 equals an underrepresentation of the respective socio-demographic group in users of digital services:
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Age: population older than 60 years
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Gender: female population
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Education, four dummies: “with no school graduation”, “high school diploma” (Realschulabschluss), “high school graduation” (Hochschulreife), “university graduation” (Hochschulabschluss), reference: vocational extension certificate (Hauptschulabschluss)
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Income, two dummies: ‘income1’ (1500€–3000€ monthly household income), ‘income2’ (over 3000€ monthly household income), reference: (monthly household income lower than 1500€)
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Region: inhabitant of an urban area
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Heuberger, M., Schwab, C. (2021). Challenges of Digital Service Provision for Local Governments from the Citizens’ View: Comparing Citizens’ Expectations and Their Experiences of Digital Service Provision. In: Bergström, T., Franzke, J., Kuhlmann, S., Wayenberg, E. (eds) The Future of Local Self-Government. Palgrave Studies in Sub-National Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56059-1_9
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