Citizen motivations, digital skills, and government responsiveness: Three essays on digital equity in public service delivery

Digital technologies have fundamentally restructured the relationship between citizens and their governments. As public services shift to digital platforms, existing social and economic disparities create disadvantages for historically marginalized communities in their ability to engage digitally and access public services. This dissertation bridges the literature on digital divide with core public administration theories to examine three aspects of citizen-side digital equity in the context of public service delivery: the motivations of citizens to engage in digital coproduction, the measurement and validation of digital skills needed for accessing government services, and the relationship between citizens’ digital engagement capacity, bureaucratic representation, and government responsiveness. The first essay examines whether residents who engage in digital coproduction using 311 platforms are motivated by self-interest or community-orientation, and whether motivations vary by neighborhood-level income. Using supervised machine learning and spatial regression on a dataset of 311 requests from Newark, New Jersey, the study finds that most requests reflect community-oriented motivations, and these are more prevalent in lower-income neighborhoods. The second essay develops and validates a 9-item unidimensional scale for measuring the digital skills citizens need to access government services online, using survey responses and objective performance on a simulated government website. Age and education emerge as significant predictors of digital skills. The study also finds that individuals with the lowest objective performance overestimate their skills the most, revealing a Dunning–Kruger pattern with important implications for how public administrators identify and target digital skill gaps. The third essay extends the concept of administrative literacy to digital contexts by examining whether neighborhoods with higher digital engagement capacity—encompassing access to digital infrastructure, digital skills, and propensity to use digital technologies—receive faster 311 responses in New York City. The results show that higher digital skills and greater propensity to use digital channels are associated with faster response times, while access alone has no effect. Bureaucratic representation does not buffer the disadvantage associated with lower digital engagement capacity, supporting the view that discretion in digital service delivery is stage-dependent. Together, the three essays demonstrate that the digitalization of public service delivery is not neutral to citizen-side inequities and that different dimensions of digital equity may require different strategies for ensuring equitable governance.