Determinants of information and communication technologies for the online citizen participation adoption in urban contexts

The electronic citizen participation (e-participation) is considered a branch of e-government with a focus on citizen involvement in information, consultation, and decision-making processes along with local governments. E-participation is considered an important pillar to support an inclusive and participative democracy. Governments all around the world, mainly local governments, are implementing different e-participation tools, for instance, online participatory budgeting, e-petitions, online incident reporting systems, online forums, etc. The potential benefits for the society of citizens engagement in the use of e-participation is widely agreed in the literature. However, the drivers of the e-participation adoption by the citizens are still on an exploratory stage in existing research. The understanding of the e-participation adoption factors is of a crucial importance for defining governmental strategies that pursue the citizen participatory engagement. This thesis contributes to a better understanding of the determinants of e-participation adoption in the urban contexts at individual level. The dissertation first carries out a review of the existing literature following a quantitative approach. Second, we developed three research models grounded in theories as unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), psychological empowerment, social capital, and sense of virtual community. Each model was evaluated in a cross-sectional experiment in two Portuguese cities that have implemented e-participation tools. The analysis of each model and its results are analysed in detail in each of the sections of this dissertation. And finally, we propose two lines for future research, one focused on the citizens satisfaction with e-participation, and the other explores the inclusion of components from social geography. Furthermore, the findings from this dissertation also provide insights for local governments that implement e-participation tools. The literature review of sixty quantitative studies published from the year 2000 to year 2017 revealed that the factors with stronger effect on the intention to use e-participation were the perceived usefulness, attitude, trust, trust in government, effort expectancy, and social influence. However, the most of these studies used a single theory of information systems to investigate e-participation, which may not uncover specific factors of the e-participation phenomenon. Moreover, the success of e-participation tools relies on the continuous usage over time. Understanding solely the drivers of intention to use in the short time does not guarantee the success in the long-term adoption. From the three research models presented in this dissertation, the first model focus on the study of the intention to use, usage, and intention to recommend e-participation. The last two focus on the continued intention to use e-participation. The first study develops a model that integrates the psychological empowerment, as second-order construct, and UTAUT to explain the intention to use and intention to recommend e-participation. We found that performance expectancy and empowerment were the stronger motivators of intention to use, and empowerment was the stronger driver for the citizens recommend the e-participation technologies. The second study evaluates the effect of each of the dimensions of empowerment plus habit on the continued intention to use e-participation. Results show that competence, meaning, and habit have a significant effect on the continuous intention. Multigroup analysis in this study revealed that the use of e-participation has stronger meaning for older participants. The third cross-sectional study integrates the sense of virtual community theory with constructs of UTAUT that have a direct effect on the usage behaviour, namely facilitating conditions and habit. We found that habit is a good predictor of use behaviour and continued intention, nevertheless, sense of virtual community resulted a good predictor of e-participation usage in the short term, but not significant on the continued intention to use over time.