Nations. Their findings show that there is greater e-government capability in countries that have more effective public sector governance and administration as well as policies that advance the development and diffusion of information and communication technologies. The comparative study of Serdült et al. (2023) extended the existing index of digital political participation in the Swiss cantons to the national and international levels and found that existing measures of digital political participation overestimate opportunities for digital political participation in countries with rather low levels of substantive digital political participation. According to Peixoto and Steinberg (2019), technologies can substantially impact how citizens engage and how power is sought; however, only when institutions change their rules to match the capabilities of modern tools and the expectations of the public.

Previous research also highlights the importance of critical analogue enabling factors, including the necessary Access to Information and media enabling environment that foster citizen engagement as well as the effect that ICT enabled platforms can have in this context. In this regard, literature on the efficacy of Freedom of Information (FoI) and Access to Information (ATI) legislation supports the importance of government transparency in facilitating citizen engagement. FoI and ATI laws have been found to be associated with both increased perceptions and detection rates of corruption (Costa, 2012) as well as improved government decision-making and public awareness (Hazell, Worthy, and Glover, 2010). While such legislation may provide a useful prerequisite for citizens to hold government to account, their effectiveness has been found to increase in contexts of higher media freedom, political pluralism, and CSO activism (Vadlamannati and Cooray, 2016). Linking this to the use of ICT-enabled platforms, Peixoto (2013) highlights the importance of technological capacity to process politically important data as well as the existence of a free press and internet in doing so.

Another strand of research suggests that more democratic institutions and processes may impact the relationship between digital technologies and citizen participation. Kneuer and Harnisch (2016) analyzed “when” and “how” e-government and e-participation diffuse among regime subtypes. Their results show that e-government and e-participation adoption differs substantially between and among regime types over time and in kind. Democracies, on average, adopt more e-government and e-participation tools than autocracies, and they do so earlier, whereas deficient democracies adopt much fewer e-techniques than established democracies, and they do so later. In this regard, the literature also argues that elite capture, lack of civic capacities, or other local factors could undermine the potential gains from citizen participation and citizen associations could even be un-representative or manipulated (Gaventa and Barrett 2010; Bonfiglioli 2003, Golooba-Mutebi 2004, Crook and Sturla Sverrisson 2001).

Additional research reveals that greater use of e-government websites may even have negative effects on citizens' satisfaction and perceptions of public sector trustworthiness (Porumbescu 2016). Welch et al. (2005) used US survey data to assess the link between e-government and citizen satisfaction. Their findings show that, in general, the use of online services increases citizens’ satisfaction, which in turn increases their trust in the government; however, individuals with more concern about the government's responsiveness tend to be less satisfied. Moreover, greater use of information can also enable bad governments to better realize bad policy objectives (Jacobs, 2017). As such, Ragnedda (2018) and Roos, Ank and Albert (2022) found that digital citizen engagement could lead to social exclusion due to unequal digital literacy and access to the internet. Thus, factors such as political regime, civil liberty and justice, quality of the institution, and internet usage could affect citizen engagement and participation.

# **III. Data and Statistical Analysis**

**1. Data and Sources**

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