E-Government—The Inclusive Way for the Future of Digital Citizenship
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors! I was pleased to get acquainted with your work, which touches on a new, relevant and interesting topic.
However, let me make a few comments that I hope will improve your article.
1. Mixed literature review. It is not clear whether such an analysis was made before you. Are there similar studies for certain countries?
2. You can find differences in ICT usage in Europe as well as around the world, but all of a sudden you start writing about two specific countries. Even though you keep writing
We chose Norway and Slovakia for our study because of their different use of ICT, differences in the digital world and the fact that they are located on the same continent and are partners in the EEA agreement.
I think it is necessary above, before you start writing specifically about what is happening in these two countries, to somehow indicate why you are focusing on them. Or write about different countries, and then select these two according to some criterion. Here the choice of approach is left to the author. This should also be clarified in the abstract.
3. In addition to approaching the problem, you are trying to pull out completely incomprehensible places in the studies from the articles of 2010-2015, when the interaction of society with other social systems through information and communication technologies was just beginning.
4. Another major element in how people began to use digital technologies was the passage of the Covid 19 period. This is rather a major driving factor that forced everyone at the level of state laws to go online and start interacting online. But the authors generally ignore this topic, as if it does not exist.
5. As for the conclusions on the article, they do not answer the questions posed. In addition, in the conclusions, the authors write only general words about the Slovaks and say absolutely nothing about Norway, as well as about any parallels and differences in relation to these countries, which looks strange.
Thus, this article requires additional study and improvement.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1. Please, read our response in the attachment.
Sincerely,
Miroslava on behalf of all authors.
Reviewer 2 Report
The article addresses a current, interesting and necessary topic to study.The background presentation in the introduction is interesting and up to date. The data is presented clearly and correctly. Overall it's a good paper.
However, it is necessary to work on the following aspects:
An interesting theoretical approach to address the research problem is presented, but it is disjointed from the results presented.
In the discussion, the theoretical reflection is presented again, but disjointed from the results.
In coherence, it is necessary to improve the coherence between the theoretical discussion and the results presented.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2.
Please, see attached to our response.
Sincerely,
Miroslava on behalf of all authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
In this paper, the author(s) compare Norway and Slovakia in order to (i) assess eGovernment usage among various social groups and (ii) identify what these two countries can learn from each other to improve digital citizenship. The authors apply logistic regression to estimate the relationship between eGovernment usage and various socio-economic variables, using secondary data. The authors clearly state the research questions, methods, and data sources.
However, upon reading the paper in its entirety, there appears to be a lack of consistency between the conceptual framework, research questions, results, and discussion sections. While the conceptual framework discusses digital citizenship in detail and presents the competencies of democratic culture (Figure 1), it is not revisited in the discussion section to contextualize the results. Furthermore, in Section 2.2, the authors present the hypothesis without discussing the evidence presented in the previous sections. As a reader, I failed to understand the basis for the author(s)' hypothesis and the purpose of including conceptual framework.
In terms of answering the research questions, the data and results section only presents the results to answer the first research question regarding the eGovernment usage among various social groups. To improve this section, the authors could consider defining "social groups" for the context of this paper. This is especially relevant to understand the results section, where only correlation to education and income. The independent variables also include age and sex, which are significant in some cases but not discussed in detail the results sections. Author(s) could consider explaining the variation in results for different dependent variables in the results or discussion section.
The discussion section, which in my opinion, should contextualize the results within the existing literature, seems to focus on the second research question of what these countries can learn from each other. It also seems to be leaning more towards Slovakia's plans for the future instead of discussing the efforts made by Norway. Moreover, this section includes policy suggestions for Slovakia, which I believe should be a separate section.
Lastly, the authors acknowledge the possibility of limitations in this study but do not elaborate on such limitations. One possible explanation for the difference between the two countries could be trust in government. The authors briefly mention trust in the discussion section, but do not reflect on it in the context of comparative analysis.
Other minor points to strengthen the paper include:
· Providing context or background when discussing Norway and Slovakia in the introduction section. Although the abstract mentions the two countries, the first three paragraphs do not explain the context of the study.
· Completing the last sentence of the introduction before the research questions (line 105) : “The aim of this study is therefore the best eGovernment in Norway and Slovakia according to their national statistics.”
· Providing the p-values for the asterisks.
· Considering searching Government Information Quarterly and Information Polity journals for related eGovernment articles, if author(s) do not have any disciplinary restrictions.
· Including references to support claims made in the discussion section.
Overall, the author(s) could consider limiting the scope of the study to the first research question and use the different context of the two countries to interpret the findings in detail. In doing so, the author(s) will contribute additional evidence to the eGovernment literature.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 3.
Please, see attached to read our response.
Sincerely, Miroslava on behalf of all authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The article has been greatly improved. Unfortunately, I would like to see the answer of the authors. They wrote that there is an answer in the application. But the application was not in my files
Author Response
Reviewer 1
We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the valuable comments concerning the manuscript. According to the suggestions from reviewer nr. 1, changes have been made and marked with tracking changes in the manuscript. Our response to each comment, read in italic, please. We have some remarks concerning the Reviewers' comments:
Dear authors! I was pleased to get acquainted with your work, which touches on a new, relevant and interesting topic.
However, let me make a few comments that I hope will improve your article.
Mixed literature review. It is not clear whether such an analysis was made before you. Are there similar studies for certain countries?
We agreed and added several comparative studies to our manuscript (lines 60-67).
2. You can find differences in ICT usage in Europe as well as around the world, but all of a sudden you start writing about two specific countries. Even though you keep writing
We chose Norway and Slovakia for our study because of their different use of ICT, differences in the digital world and the fact that they are located on the same continent and are partners in the EEA agreement.
I think it is necessary above, before you start writing specifically about what is happening in these two countries, to somehow indicate why you are focusing on them. Or write about different countries, and then select these two according to some criterion. Here the choice of approach is left to the author. This should also be clarified in the abstract.
We added several comparative studies to our manuscript, and we explain the reason why we chose these two countries (lines 60-67 and 81-102).
3.In addition to approaching the problem, you are trying to pull out completely incomprehensible places in the studies from the articles of 2010-2015, when the interaction of society with other social systems through information and communication technologies was just beginning.
This part of our manuscript was revised.
Another major element in how people began to use digital technologies was the passage of the Covid 19 period. This is rather a major driving factor that forced everyone at the level of state laws to go online and start interacting online. But the authors generally ignore this topic, as if it does not exist.
We added more information about the Covid-19 pandemic (lines 47-52).
5. As for the conclusions on the article, they do not answer the questions posed. In addition, in the conclusions, the authors write only general words about the Slovaks and say absolutely nothing about Norway, as well as about any parallels and differences in relation to these countries, which looks strange.
Thus, this article requires additional study and improvement.
The aim of this study was to explore the digital divide and digital citizenship in e-government usage with a focus on differences within various social groups in Slovakia and Norway according to national statistics. All authors agreed to perform a descriptive statistical analysis followed by its discussion. It is important to highlight that our goal was to start a debate (especially in Slovakia), not point to find a solution. Researchers from these two countries established a collaboration and try to do various research projects with the goal to give Slovakia examples from “good practice” regarding eGovernment, too.
Sincerely,
Miroslava Tokovska on behalf of all authors
Oslo, 15th of May 2023
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for making the changes. The updated version is clear. However, I would request the authors to elaborate on the limitations of the study in the last paragraph of the conclusion. It is not automatically clear what study limitations the authors are referring to.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 3.
Thanks for the feedback. We agree and added several sentences in the last paragraph in connection with the limitations of our study. Regarding the English language, we used and paid for proofreading services.
Have a nice day.
Best Regards,
Miroslava Tokovska, PhD.
on behalf of all co-authors
