Exploring motivation through the lens of self-determination theory: Citizens’ online participation

In recent years, public sector organizations increasingly focus on citizens in achieving social innovation. By leveraging modern technology, they are trying to absorb external knowledge by openly calling citizens for participation in open government platforms. This article examines citizens’ participation in these platforms and investigates the factors influencing users’ platform activity. By drawing on self-determination theory, we propose that individuals with autonomous (identified and intrinsic) motivation participate more frequently and actively than those with controlled (introjected and external) motivation. Through a survey among users of an idea generation platform initiated by local government and multivariate analysis, we find substantial support that intrinsic and identified motivation drives users’ activity on the open government platform. We use our finding to further characterize the ‘citizen innovator’ and to enrich our understanding of which groups of citizens respond to open calls by local government to participate in idea generation platforms.