Despite the significant amounts of public investment devoted to enhancing e-government over the last ten years, citizens’ use of this service is still limited, posing a challenge to national governments. By analysing panel data derived from 27 European countries for the period 2010 to 2018, our work confirms that citizens’ use of egovernment services is influenced by supply-side e-government evaluations, citizens’ trust in governments and the digital divide associated to income and education. Moreover, a longitudinal cluster analysis allows us to identify patterns of behaviour between the countries as regards the way those variables interact with the use of egovernment services over time. Relevant practical implications derive from the research that can guide public policy in the area of e-government.

Introduction

Electronic government aims to make public institutions more transparent and accountable. The European Commission recognised the importance of digital transformation of the state as early as 2006 and is currently implementing the EU e-Government Action Plan 2016–۲۰۲۰ (EC, 2016). Since 2012 and on a yearly basis, it publishes the e-government benchmark reports which compare the penetration, and digitisation of e-Government services in 34 European countries (EC, 2018a). According to Eurostat Statistics (EC, 2018b), only 57% of individuals aged 16 to 74 reported using the Internet for interaction with public authorities in 2018. Furthermore, since 2009, this share has risen by only 15% on average (EC, 2019). In this context, it is necessary to question the reasons for this low level of adoption of e-government. The present work aims to answer two research objectives. The first aim is to verify whether certain characteristics of European countries can explain the use of e-government by citizens, in particular: supplyside e-government performance evaluations, citizen trust in their government, per capita income, education, age and rurality. The second aim is to identify patterns of behaviour across European countries as regards the way these characteristics interact with the level of e-government use over time. On the one hand, it seems logical to expect supply-side aspects of egovernment to be an instrument in enhancing citizen’s perception of egovernment and therefore affect usage levels. Recent decades have seen a growth in evaluations of e-government maturity, examples being West’s assessment of e-government performance (2005, 2008), the United Nations E-government Development Index and E-Participation Index (UN, 2010,2012,2014,2016,2018) or the Digital Governance Index by Holzer and Manoharan (2016).