From policy to practice in digital governance: A three-level analysis of citizen-centric applications

Abstract

Amidst the growing importance of digital governance, the need to formulate a governance framework and integrate policy and regulation mechanisms is also increasing. There is also a need to assess the digital governance paradigm in terms of how citizens are responding to it. In doing so, we have carried out a three-level analysis: app developers’ claims, app users’ opinions, and finally, the gap between these levels - is compared by using ten citizen-centric applications from ten different countries hosted on Google Play Store. These applications are assessed based on their self-declaration on Google Play Store on 15 preset parameters, second by sentiment analysis of reviews through VADER and RoBERTa models and finally, a ten-parameter analysis. The paper comprehensively reviews the governance aspect of citizen-centric applications and highlights key elements of digital governance.