Administrative and Digital Literacy: the Legend or Myth in e-Government

New literacies are often used to denote the abilities to swiftly use data, information and knowledge in the modern age. In this paper we re-examined the hypothesis that a citizen having higher digital and administrative literacy would more frequently and with a higher success rate use e-government services. We analysed the collected applications received to a tender conducted by a public housing institution for renting flats under favourable conditions to citizens. The concerned citizens were intentionally offered two possibilities for submitting their applications: in paper form by the ordinary mail or in electronic form via the internet. The electronic web form was designed to be simple and easy to access, use and navigate; submitting and completing the application for renting flats through the web was of the same, if not of the lesser, complexity than filling and sending the same application by the ordinary mail. Contrary to a popular belief that the electronic submission would be typically preferred by more digitally and administrative literate citizens, the results of our study indicate that the completeness of submitted applications by the ordinary mail was significantly better than the completeness of the applications submitted via the web form. There is an agreement that citizens' digital literacy has to reach a certain level in order to start successfully using the available e-government services. However, our results indicate that a high digital literacy might not be enough. In some cases it not only ceases to help, but might also degrade the overall performance and success of a citizen using e-government services.