The role of trust in approaching e-government services: a comprehensive theoretical framework

The article has a theoretical purpose. It develops a framework about the role of trust in e-government services. It focuses in particular on the initial stage of the relationship between a user and a public administration engaged in the provision of e-government services. In this context the authors aim to develop a theoretical framework showing the role played by different categories of “trust” in determining the user’s behaviour when given the opportunity of accessing e-government services for the first time. Moving from different theoretical approaches seven hypothesis are deduced from the literature review concerning the concepts of political trust, the institutional approach to trust, trust in e-commerce and calculus based trust. The resulting path leads to a comprehensive model that demonstrates at the end how trust in experimenting e-government initiatives contribute to form and consequently increasing a thick concept of trust (that is trust which can be accumulated) in such services as well as in the public administration in general. On this bases a theoretical framework is developed and a sort of agenda of an upcoming empirical research project is proposed. The main positive aspect of the proposed framework is a processes approach to trust and the consideration of different theoretical perspective to the study of initial trust in egovernment initiatives.