Digital administrative burden as a civic education problem: A conceptual and methodological framework for digital citizenship, social justice, and citizenship rights among vulnerable groups

Abstract

As public services move onto digital platforms, civic education must prepare citizens not only to use technology responsibly but also to understand, claim, and contest the services through which their rights are realised. This article develops a conceptual and methodological framework that reframes digital administrative burden in Indonesia as a problem of citizenship formation and substantive rights. For citizens facing poverty, disability, old age, rural remoteness, or limited literacy, opaque digital procedures do more than create technical difficulty; they erode civic agency. Drawing on administrative burden theory, Marshall's citizenship rights, Sen's capability approach, and digital citizenship scholarship, the article proposes a model linking learning, compliance, and psychological costs to perceived access, service justice, and civic confidence. It situates this model within Indonesian civic education through Pancasila's principle of social justice and outlines a fieldwork protocol for future empirical testing. The article argues that digital access is never merely administrative: it is where citizens learn whether the state recognises them as equal, rights-bearing members of a democratic community.