Digital government responsiveness: a scale and pilot evaluation

Abstract

Digital technologies have continually raised expectations that governments can become more responsive to the needs of their audiences. Existing measures of digital government responsiveness have focused predominantly on service delivery aspects. The paper presents a comprehensive digital government responsiveness scale through a multi-stage process that includes item generation, scale construction and psychometric evaluation. Conceptualised as a formative higher-order construct, the scale integrates three dimensions: service-oriented, public value-oriented and user-oriented responsiveness. A pilot study with 373 users of digital government services in Shenzhen, China confirms the structural validity of the scale and supports item refinement. The findings indicate substantial differences in how responsiveness is perceived in traditional, civil servant–led interactions compared with AI‐mediated channels. We discuss how the scale provides an adaptable framework for assessing responsiveness across diverse digital interaction contexts.