Experiencing Digital Governance: Citizens’ Technological Attitudes and Behavioral Profiles in Greece

This paper examines how citizens experience, evaluate, and understand technological change and digital governance, focusing on the structure of technological attitudes in contemporary society. Drawing on original survey data collected from 500 citizens in Greece, the study conceptualizes technological orientations not merely as individual skills or access to digital tools, but as multidimensional attitudinal configurations that shape citizens’ relationship with the digital state. Existing research on digital governance often emphasizes institutional design, policy outputs, or digital divides, while citizens’ subjective experiences and expectations remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by systematically mapping how individuals perceive technological progress, digital transition, and the expansion of digital public services. The survey includes detailed measures of digital familiarity and intensity of use, everyday purposes of technology, awareness and use of municipal digital services, evaluations of usability and satisfaction, preferred modes of communication with local authorities, and expectations regarding further digitalization. Methodologically, the paper employs a two-step multivariate strategy combining Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis. MCA is used to uncover the latent dimensions structuring citizens’ technological attitudes, allowing key antagonisms to emerge inductively from the data. These dimensions capture contrasts such as confidence versus insecurity in digital environments, instrumental versus normative evaluations of digitalization, and satisfaction versus frustration with existing digital governance tools. Cluster analysis is then applied to the MCA results to construct empirically grounded technological profiles, grouping citizens according to coherent patterns of attitudes, usage, and expectations. The analysis reveals that citizens’ experiences of digital governance are far from homogeneous. Distinct profiles emerge, combining different levels of digital competence with differentiated evaluations of state performance, trust in digital services, and visions of future technological development. Importantly, the findings show that positive attitudes toward digitalization do not necessarily coincide with satisfaction with existing digital governance arrangements, highlighting the gap between technological potential and institutional implementation. By treating technological attitudes as structured social phenomena rather than isolated indicators, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of citizen–state relations in the digital era. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of multivariate exploratory techniques for capturing complex attitudinal configurations. Substantively, it provides insights relevant to debates on digital governance, public service delivery, and democratic responsiveness in technologically transforming societies.