Abstract
The COVID‐19 pandemic put governments under pressure to make radical and urgent decisions, and to implement new digital solutions to steer society and deliver public services. Our study analyzes social media discourse to understand the co‐production of a digital public service in an emergency situation. Empirically, we mobilize Twitter netnography and discourse analysis to examine citizens’ perceptions of the contact tracing app (CTA) introduced by the UK government to tackle the pandemic and save lives. Our study contributes to research on public sector accountability for digital transformations by advancing scholarly understanding of how societal concerns and public perceptions impact the co‐production of digital services. Our findings reveal a high level of public skepticism toward the app and a general distrust of the UK government among the main social challenges of the CTA's implementation. Furthermore, we evidence widespread public distress over the potential violation of democratic freedoms and misuse of the data collected by the app. Finally, we reflect on the linkages between the lack of governmental accountability and the difficulties in mitigating the expressed societal concerns, causing a corresponding resistance on the part of the public to engage in and support co‐production.
Highlights
The introduction of digital technologies to the delivery of public services reshapes the interactions between governments and citizens (Agostino, Arnaboldi, & Lema, 2020)
To answer our research question of how citizens’ perceptions affect the co-production of digital public services in the context of an emergency, we examine the studied discourse by applying the rational-technical lens of UTAUT, at the same time acknowledging simultaneously the roles of the social environment, trust of citizens in the government and the implications of trust for the accountability relationships between the parties
During the global COVID-19 pandemic governments rushed to deploy a wide range of measures, including the e-government solution of contact tracing app (CTA)
Summary
The introduction of digital technologies to the delivery of public services reshapes the interactions between governments and citizens (Agostino, Arnaboldi, & Lema, 2020). Today’s governments actively engage with digital solutions for service delivery, accountability and coproduction with various stakeholders. 38), enhance public scrutiny of government actions and social debates. The pandemic brought governments into situations beyond ‘business as usual’ and forced them to mobilise instruments and resources to make radical decisions under extreme pressures of urgency and public scrutiny. Co-production played a vital role, as many public government policies only worked because citizens co-operated voluntarily and on a large scale, for example by co-producing medical goods and services and adhering to government lockdown policies (Steen & Brandsen, 2020)
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