Establishing relational trust in e-Participation: a systematic literature review to propose a model Burcu Demirdoven Pamukkale University Turkey burcudemirdoven@gmail.com Ecem Buse Sevinc Cubuk Aydin Adnan Menderes University Turkey ecembuse.sevinc@adu.edu.tr Naci Karkin Pamukkale University Turkey nkirgin@pau.edu.tr ABSTRACT 1 As information and communication technologies (ICTs) have diffused throughout the customary forms of works and services, various models, theories and approaches have emerged and been developed to measure how and to what extent people accept technologically transformed products and services in the e- government domain. Despite the existence of applicable models regarding the acceptance and diffusion of e-government and e- participation, the current literature has failed to fully cover citizens’ expectations due to factors affecting complex and organic bonds between states and citizens (i.e. trust). This study aims to discuss whether and how trust serves as an intermediary function with regard to technology acceptance models on e-government in general but e-participation in particular. This review finds (1) that it is necessary to develop a comprehensive approach for a trust- building environment regarding e-participation and (2) that trust in e-participation can be consolidated through interrelation among and within parties. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Computers in other domains → Computing in government → E-government KEYWORDS Trust Model, e-Participation, Literature Review ACM Reference format: Burcu Demirdoven, Ecem Buse Sevinc Cubuk, Naci Karkin. 2020. Establishing relational trust in e-Participation: a systematic literature review to propose a model. In Proceedings of the 13 th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV 2020), 23-25 September 2020, Athens, Greece, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3428502.3428549 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. ICEGOV'20, September 23–25, 2020, Athens, Greece © 2020 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7674-7/20/09…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3428502.3428549 1. INTRODUCTION The efforts towards citizens’ participation in democratic decision- making processes through electronic services have revealed the question of reliance on these novel systems, particularly identified with the concept of “trust”. The brief overview of the literature represents a rich pool of studies dealing with either participation or trust, but scarce resources analyzing both of them. The concept of trust exclusively points out to the promotion of “cooperation and social interaction – regardless of the goals or what is at stake – in social life” [1]. Trust in e-government issues requires the joint action of government and citizens as the provider and the user. These services imply engagement or empowerment of citizens in government business through the digitalization process. Citizens are expected to participate wherever and whenever possible in the context of online consultation and decision-making processes to the extent possible. In addition, e-participation as a supplementary mechanism of e-government has been furnished with a complex structure of “trust” issues, still lacking the proper conceptualization. Therefore, it is a necessity to analyze the effects of citizens’ perceptions arising out of trust [2]. Trust is vital in e-public services due to the high-intensity effect on the adoption of these services [3] or the life cycle of an e-participation process [2]. The literature still lacks the framework on decisive elements in what ways or at what rate citizens could display e-participation tendencies. The answer might be found by digging up through the review of the current theoretical models developed on the use and acceptance of technology such as theory of reasoned action (TRA)[4], theory of planned behavior (TPB)[5], theory of interpersonal behavior (TIB)[6], technology acceptance model (TAM)[7], extension of TAM (ETAM)[8], Igbaria’s model (IM)[9], social cognitive theory (SCT)[10], diffusion of innovations theory (DOI)[11], perceived characteristics of innovating theory 341