How perceived social support encourages citizen coproduction: Evidence from government social media

Abstract

Abstract

Governments increasingly rely on digital channels to support public service delivery and facilitate citizen participation. This study examines how perceived social support, defined as citizens’ subjective experience of receiving informational and emotional assistance from peers, shapes citizen coproduction in social media-based e-government contexts. Drawing on survey data from 768 users of Chongqing Release, a municipal government Weibo account in China, the study applies structural equation modelling to analyse the motivational mechanisms underlying peer-to-peer interaction and voluntary contribution. The findings show that perceived social support has a significant direct effect on coproduction. In addition, it operates through psychological mechanisms associated with the satisfaction of basic needs, particularly relatedness and autonomy. These results indicate that citizen participation in digital governance is driven both by reciprocal responses to received support and by internally experienced social connection and autonomy. They further suggest that digital government platforms can support coproduction through formal service design as well as by facilitating low-cost, peer-to-peer interactions. Such participation appears to rely less on competence or expertise and more on relational and affective factors. This study shifts the focus of coproduction research from institutional arrangements toward everyday digital interactions and highlights the importance of socially embedded, lightweight forms of citizen contribution. Points to practitioners • Government social media should be managed not only as a channel for information delivery, but also as an interactional space in which citizens can generate public value through mutual support and peer-to-peer exchange. • Public agencies should pay greater attention to emotional support, not only informational usefulness. In this study, emotional support showed the stronger overall effect on coproduction intention, suggesting that encouragement, recognition and responsive interaction may be especially important for sustaining citizen participation. • Effective digital participation depends less on citizens’ expertise than on whether they feel socially connected and able to participate on their own terms. This implies that governments may achieve more by lowering psychological barriers and offering flexible, low-threshold participation formats than by relying on highly skilled users alone. • The role of government in digital governance should extend beyond service provision to the facilitation of citizen-to-citizen interaction. Designing platforms that support visibility, acknowledgement and open engagement can help create the relational conditions under which coproduction emerges and persists.