How Citizen Demand Affects the Process of M-Government Adoption: An Empirical Study in China

Abstract

Mobile government applications have been increasingly adopted by governments around the world, but their use by targeted clients is lower than expected and under-examined in the literature. We conceptualize citizen adoption of m-government as a dynamic process composed of three interrelated stages—awareness, current use, and future use. However, we suggest that citizen demand will affect them differently. To test this, we used recent survey data from a Chinese city to examine the antecedents of citizen adoption of an m-government application, a traffic APP. The results reveal that citizens’ commuting demands significantly affected their awareness of the APP, but did not impact their current and planned future uses, which were primarily affected by citizens’ perceptions and habits. These findings help open up the “black box” of citizen adoption, and generate policy suggestions for boosting citizen use, of m-government.