15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Liran Harsgor
Discussant/s:
Anja Neundorf
Meeting Room R

Yoshiaki Kubo, Isamu Okada
Public Attitudes toward Foreign Travelers under a Global Pandemic: A Conjoint Experiment in Japan

Sebastian Ziaja, Markus Geray, David Sebudubudu, Armin von Schiller
Electronic governance and citizen attitudes towards the democratic state

Liran Harsgor
Risky War, Risky Peace: The Gender Gap in Security Preferences
Electronic governance and citizen attitudes towards the democratic state
Sebastian Ziaja 1, Markus Geray 2, David Sebudubudu 3, Armin von Schiller 1
1 German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)
2 ETH Zurich
3 University of Botswana

For many citizens in countries of the Global South, the relationship with the state is rather vague and not characterised by high levels of interaction. Low state presence is a particularly strong phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa, where governments are heavily resource-constrained and historically struggle to project and exercise power across their territory. This has major consequences on the relationship between politicians, governments and citizens as well as on the arrangements between formal and informal institutions. Digitalisation, and in particular e-government services reduce the cost and preconditions to engage directly with citizens. They are heralded to offer a powerful tool for weak government institutions willing to reach and engage more heavily with citizens. In this paper, we test the effect of the exposure to e-government services on citizen’s perceptions about how much politicians care for their problems. The results of a randomised controlled trial in cooperation with the tax administration of Botswana and an original survey on the use of e-services and political attitudes in Gaborone indicate that the use of e-services positively affects this perception. These results have major implications on how digital tools can be used and misused to improve the relationship between citizens and the state in democratic countries characterised by low state capacity.