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How Public Servants’ Characteristics, Attitudes and Competences Affect Perceptions of E-participation? Evidence from St. Petersburg, Russia
How do specific characteristics of public servants impact their attitudes towards e-participation? In the current literature on e-government and e-participation there is surprisingly a little number of articles that cover this issue. Usually, researchers pay their attention to organizational and structural explanations for e-participation adoption and implementation success. This includes economic variables, such as GDP and openness to trade, innovativeness of a particular country or a region as well as how certain agents employ different strategies to manage content. In this article we argue that there may be another important dimension which includes personal features of the public servants such as their gender, position, department and their values, attitudes and skills that may affect how they treat e-participation in their respective public administration. For these purposes, we conducted a web survey of 417 public servants in St. Petersburg, Russia. The survey questions covered their demographics, how they perceive citizens and their expertise and knowledge as well as their ICT skills. Additional questions measured their bureaucratic values and attitudes. Based on this data, we conducted an analysis running multiple linear regressions. Our results show that demographics and ICT skills don't play as important role as it was shown in the preceding studies. Furthermore, the key factor impacting the public servants’ appraisal of digital participation usefulness is their attitudes towards ordinary citizens. The more they think that the general public is constructive, the higher is their inclination towards e-participatory platforms usage. This study is a first part of a 3-year long project aimed at evaluating the Ecosystem of City Services in St. Petersburg. These findings will be used further to advance our understanding how civic servants and general public interact using digitalized communication as a part of Smart City infrastructure.