Citizen Engagement with Open Government Data: A Model for Analyzing Factors Influencing Citizen Engagement

Governmental organizations are increasingly making non-privacy-restricted and non-confidential data publicly available on the internet that anyone can freely use, reuse, and distribute without any restrictions. The opening up the government data enables citizens to engage with OGD, i.e., to collaboratively convert OGD into valuable artifacts that benefit society. However, citizen engagement with OGD is contingent upon many factors, and researchers often overlook these factors, and insight is needed to stimulate engagement. This study develops the OGD Citizen Engagement Model (OGD-CEM) that can be used to understand factors contributing to citizen engagement with OGD. The OGD-CEM model hypothesizes that (both extrinsic and intrinsic) motivations toward the engagement and perceived political factors toward OGD and government determine citizens’ intention to engage with OGD. Notably, the more citizens perceive that engaging with OGD will give them an advantage and provide the opportunity to broaden their social networks, the more inclined they will be to engage with OGD. Furthermore, the more citizens perceive that they can engage with OGD easily, that engaging with OGD is enjoyable, and that OGD engagement challenges them intellectually, the more likely they will engage with it. Finally, the more citizens perceive that their engagement with OGD will influence public policy, and the higher citizens’ trust in OGD and the governmental organizations that provide it, the more they will be inclined to engage with OGD. This study is among the first to provide an integrated overview of the profiles of citizens who engage with OGD and the drivers and inhibitors of citizen engagement with OGD. This dissertation also contributes to science by integrating political participation and trust theories into the model because engaging with OGD can yield outcomes with high political values. Moreover, this study is among the first to provide empirical evidence about the citizen-led OGD engagement. Finally, this study is also among the first to empirically test assumptions held in the open data research regarding the effects of OGD quality, political participation, and trust on the intention to engage with OGD.