From Trust to Performance: The Role of E-Government Portal Quality in Shaping Citizens’ Evaluations in Kazakhstan

Abstract

With the rise in digitalization, governments have started relying more on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to make interaction with citizens more efficient. The introduction and further development of e-services such as e-government could be considered as a new factor in determining the previously established trust-performance dynamics. Despite a wide range of studies focusing on the link between citizens’ trust in government and user satisfaction as well as effectiveness of e government in dealing with corruption and increasing citizen participation (Garcia-Rio et al., 2023; Knox & Janenova, 2019; Sheryazdanova & Butterfield, 2017), the public sector field has fallen short of investigating the mediating role of e-government between citizens’ trust in government and positive assessments of its effectiveness, especially in the context of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. To fill this gap, this study will focus on evaluating Kazakhstani citizens’ experience with e-government and assess whether it plays a role in trust-performance dynamics. This study partially utilized the updated DeLone and McLean IS success model (2003, 2004) as the base for its theoretical framework. The model is evaluated through a survey of 176 Kazakhstani e-government website users. This paper did find a link between citizens’ trust in government and positive assessments of government performance, supporting the previous literature on these dynamics and extending it to a Kazakhstani case. Besides, the findings show that trust in government is positively related with three e-government website qualities: information quality, system quality, and service quality. Yet, quality constructs were not found to have any effect on citizens’ perceptions of government performance, thus our hypotheses regarding the mediating effect of e-government website quality were not supported. This study concludes by discussing the implications of our findings, provision of policy recommendations and limitations which should be addressed in future research.