Public Trust and Political Legitimacy in the Smart City: A Reckoning for Technocracy

Hong Kong’s 2020 national security law (NSL) was introduced by China’s central government at a time of deep social and political division in the city (Purbrick 2020).¹ In mid-2019, street protests erupted in opposition to a proposed extradition law that appeared to place Hong Kong residents at risk of legal prosecution in mainland China’s court system (Purbrick 2019). Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents took to the streets, chanting slogans against the proposed law (F. L. F. Lee et al. 2019). Tense moments between some protesters and police led occasionally to property damage, with images of apparent disorder circulating around the world (Hui 2020; Ismangil and Lee 2020). In spring 2020, as another summer of possible unrest loomed, China’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress enacted the broadly interpretable NSL to quell further protests and other forms of anti-government dissention. According to Yellinek (2020), “the passage of the new law probably is the most significant political change that has taken place since Hong Kong was transferred to China” (p. 44). Despite the introduction of the NSL, much of the anti-government sentiment that ignited the 2019 protests remains (Singh 2020), inflamed in part by systematic legal prosecution of lawmakers, political organizers, and public intellectuals seen to oppose the governments of Hong Kong and China (N. Wong et al. 2021). As such, Hong Kong is an instructive case to examine public trust and political legitimacy in state–society relations.

This study considers these issues within the context of smart cities—a topic whose sociopolitical dimensions are receiving increasing attention in the literature (Echebarria, Barrutia, and Aguado-Moralejo 2020; Ruhlandt 2018). The digital revolution has transformed nearly all facets of society and is reshaping the relationship between people and governments. With advances in information and communications technology and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data, quantification of policy problems and solutions suggests the rising influence of evidence-informed and technocratic perspectives. Technocracy ostensibly transcends the parlor games of politicians and power brokers to inform operable understandings about policy problems. It also reflects the logic of “instrumental rationalism”² by applying technical knowledge to policy solutions and policymaking processes. Relatedly, the practical, political, and popular allure of smart cities comes in part from their ability to cast technocratic fundamentalism as “common-sense” problem-solving focused on efficiency and effectiveness. In this way, technocratic problem-framing privileges particular epistemological orientations (Hartley and Kuecker 2020; Hartley, Kuecker, and Woo 2019). At the same time, technocracy presents only an illusion of policymaking as “sanitized” from politics. According to Hartley (2020), “technocratic systems and policy design logics emerge from social and value-laden settings; neither materializes from a mythical purity of logic but is fashioned in politically and epistemically contested environments” (p. 237).

Despite these theory-based critiques, smart city projects abound and are drawing substantial investment. Global spending on smart city projects was expected to be US$124 billion in 2020, with the highest cost endeavors being smart grids for electricity, smart transportation infrastructure, and surveillance systems (IDC 2020). Hong Kong has committed nearly US$200 million to smart city projects.³ These commercial opportunities reflect a convergence of private sector expertise and public sector technocracy through the smart city idiom, heralding a deeper reckoning for state–society relations and bearing implications for public trust and political legitimacy. According to Kuecker and Hartley (2020), “although the profit-making potential of the smart city is high, its technocratic urbanism is confined by the historically documented folly of modernity’s rationalist agenda, in which the pursuit of a perfect human condition through reason falls short in tragically ironic ways” (p. 523). As such, smart cities raise long-standing questions about the role of power in policymaking but with a uniquely modern technological flourish. A poignant illustration was the 2019 vandalization by pro-democracy protesters of a “smart” streetlight thought to contain surveillance and facial recognition capabilities (Fussell 2019).

Probing these undercurrents, this study asks how public trust and political legitimacy affect support for smart city endeavors, using an empirical analysis of public perceptions in Hong Kong. This study analyzes the results of a survey of 1,017 residents conducted in 2019. Given its timing, the survey is a snapshot of trust and legitimacy as it existed amid the aforementioned protest movement but before the introduction of the NSL; thus, it provides a baseline against which to examine changes in trust and legitimacy in Hong Kong’s NSL era. The survey investigates perceptions about smart cities from the view of political legitimacy, including equal distribution of benefits, trust in technology, protection of privacy, and degree of public input. Findings reveal a moderately high level of confidence in the potential benefits of smart cities but also concerns about lack of democratic participation in related policymaking and governance. The implication is that the mechanics of smart cities have more legitimacy than the governance of smart cities.

This article proceeds with a review of literature about political legitimacy, trust in public sector technology, and political and critical narratives concerning smart cities. The review illustrates a clear need for additional empirical research about the political dimensions of smart cities. The article continues by describing the study’s methodology, including survey design, administration, and respondent profile. Findings of univariate and multivariate regression analyses are discussed, followed by a conclusion that outlines theoretical and practical implications with a call for further research.

This literature review briefly clarifies the state of research at the intersection of political legitimacy and smart cities and is organized along three subthemes: measurement of political legitimacy and trust in government, the same for government technology, and narratives concerning the policy–commerce interface in the provision of smart cities. First, notions of political legitimacy have a deep history in the literature. A comprehensive account is beyond the scope of this review and not essential to contextualize the study; overviews can be found in Andeweg and Aarts (2017), Netelenbos (2016), Blind (2007), and Levi and Stoker (2000). Empirical comparative studies have provided useful insights into public trust and political legitimacy (van der Meer and Hakhverdian 2017; Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2013; Hartley 2015; Gilley 2006; Miller 1974). Regarding methods for empirically measuring political legitimacy, Weatherford (1992) outlines several high-level orientations (representational procedures, government performance, political involvement, and interpersonal assurance) and approaches to operationalizing the concept within these, including political factors (trust, civic pride, government responsiveness, belief in political ideals, and external efficacy) and personal factors (political interest, citizen duty, political efficacy, personal efficacy, and personal trust). This study’s variables, as described in the methodology section, draw upon elements of Weatherford’s dimensions. Extending the discussion about methods for measuring political trust, Hetherington (1998) argues that the concept should be treated not only as a dependent variable but also as an explanatory variable to capture its impact on political satisfaction in leadership and governance. Drawing on this idea, this study uses trust in technology as an explanatory variable for public support for smart cities. This study also uses perceptions about the degree of participation in policymaking for smart cities as an explanatory variable, an approach likewise supported by the literature. For example, Christensen and Lægreid (2005) find that general satisfaction with democracy, categorized as a political–cultural determinant, positively associates with varying types of trust in government. Other efforts to classify types of trust include social versus political trust (Newton, Stolle, and Zmerli 2018) and particular versus general social trust (Newton and Zmerli 2011). In examining the context of Asia, Nathan (2020) argues that authoritarian governments enjoy a puzzlingly high level of institutional trust (if not regime trust) relative to that of democratic governments. This final point relates to this study’s Hong Kong case and reveals insights about the legitimacy of technology as a tool of governance.

A parallel line of research has emerged around issues of trust and legitimacy in public sector technology. Most studies have focused on the state–society interface as mediated through online platforms for public services and government communications (i.e., “e-government”); such studies find a generally positive association between e-government and public trust or perceptions of government effectiveness and responsiveness (Savoldelli, Codagnone, and Misuraca 2014; Bélanger and Carter 2008; Carter and Bélanger 2005; Welch, Hinnant, and Jae Moon 2005). Tolbert and Mossberger (2006) find a positive association between the uses of government-based web platforms and trust in government, supporting arguments that e-government can be a tool not only for public service delivery but also for building legitimacy and “process-based” trust. Reversing the observed direction of this effect, Mensah and Adams (2019) find that political trust determines expectancy of government performance and willingness to use e-government services. Such findings are, however, occasionally contradicted by other studies. For example, Goldfinch, Gauld, and Herbison (2009) find higher e-government participation (e.g., use of government websites and e-mail communications with government departments, civil servants, and politicians) among individuals with relatively lower trust in government, while Horsburgh, Goldfinch, and Gauld (2011) identify no relationship between trust in e-government and trust in government overall. Morgeson, VanAmburg, and Mithas (2011) offer the more nuanced finding that e-government can elicit optimistic expectations about the future performance of government but has no impact on the level of trust in government more generally.

The literature also offers a variety of perspectives about the role of public trust in the context of smart cities, with security and privacy a common theme (Anwar, Nazir, and Ansari 2020; Tyagi et al. 2020; Braun et al. 2018; Chatterjee, Kumar Kar, and Gupta 2017; Khan, Pervez, and Abbasi 2017; Edwards 2016; van Zoonen 2016; Patsakis et al. 2015; Khan, Pervez, and Abbasi 2014; Bohli, Langendorfer, and Skarmeta 2013). Topics of particular relevance to this study include the assertion of citizen control over politically or commercially captured smart city agendas (Keymolen 2019), the enhancement of trust in smart city endeavors through direct engagement and government-to-citizen communications about strategies, benefits, and risks (Glasco 2019), and smart city strategies as accountable for the variously described concept of “public value” (Bolivar 2019; Osella, Ferro, and Pautasso 2016; Cosgrave, Tryfonas, and Crick 2014; Walravens and Ballon 2013; Moore 1995). Additionally, a “critical studies” literature has emerged around smart cities, often skeptically framing the concept as a replication of power structures and problematizing it through theories like Foucault’s governmentality, social–technical imaginaries, and others (Kitchin, Coletta, and McArdle 2020; Kuecker and Hartley 2020; Törnberg and Uitermark 2020; Willis 2020; Datta and Odendall 2019; Kitchin 2019; Sadowski and Bendor 2019; Klauser, Paasche, and Söderström 2014). Trust assumes an additional dimension when considering the overlay of smart city mechanisms with so-called “nudging” approaches to public policy that advocate indirect or subtle manipulation of behavior through provision of information and feedback and adjustments to conditions and rules, among other means (Hartley, Sher Wen, and Tortajada 2021; Ranchordás 2019). The broader implication for the political legitimacy of smart cities is their ability to improve quality-of-life factors. As a public good provided largely by the private sector, smart cities reflect the potential of public goods to enhance the quality of life as operationalized in this study; see S. J. Lee and Kim (2018) for a discussion about factors influencing community well-being.

Finally, a modest body of survey- and interview-based research has been conducted at the conceptual periphery of smart cities, including a study about the perceptions of practitioners from the public and private sectors about the appropriateness of public–private partnerships in the provision of smart cities technologies (Lam and Yang 2020) and a survey of perceptions from public and private sector leaders about smart city preparedness in Vietnam (Vu and Hartley 2018). Numerous studies offer descriptive accounts and analyses of Hong Kong’s smart city exploits (Govada et al. 2020; Govada et al. 2020; Li, Nam, and Khoo 2020; Jiang, Luo, and Chen 2018), but there are few empirical or survey-based studies about political legitimacy concerning smart cities in Hong Kong (Chan 2019; Chan and Marafa 2018; Mah et al. 2012). This study fills this empirical gap by presenting the results of a survey about trust and legitimacy in Hong Kong. In so doing, it also seeks to extend theoretical discussions about the relationship between technology and political legitimacy.

The survey for this study was conducted by a Hong Kong–based polling firm in October and November 2019. A proprietary web-based Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview system was used to ensure quality and consolidate data in real time. Telephone numbers were randomly selected using an official numbering plan provided by the Hong Kong Office of the Communications Authority, yielding 1,017 valid responses (505 from landlines and 512 from mobile phones). The effective response rate was 60.4 percent and standard sampling error less than ±1.6 percentage points (±3.1 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level). A quality-control question and standard data verification and logical checks identified invalid cases and other information for removal. A threshold of 30 percent for unanswered opinion questions was used to identify removable cases.

The survey structure was based on a combination of Weatherford’s (1992) elements of political trust determined a priori to be relevant for the Hong Kong case: political trust and government responsiveness as explanatory variables and political ideals as a control variable (see Table 1 for a list of questions associated with variables and Table 2 for a summary of data). Rudolph and Evans (2005) find that “the effects of political trust on support for government spending are moderated by ideology” (p. 660); consistent with this finding, political–ideological variables have been used in Hong Kong–based studies about social policy and welfare (M. Y. H. Wong 2020; He 2018; Tam 2003) and institutional legitimacy (M. Y. K. Lee and Lo 2020). These studies justify this study’s inclusion of a variable measuring respondent ideologies about the role of government in public life (labeled Gov-QOL). Inclusion of variables related to public participation (Concerns-heard and Provide-input) is supported by smart cities literature about inclusive and collaborative policymaking (Kapoor and Singh 2020; Houston, Gabrys, and Pritchard 2019; Klimovsky, Pinteric, and Saparniene 2016).

The multivariate analysis examines the effect of trust and legitimacy on public support for smart cities. Regressions are run on two dependent variables capturing public support for smart cities: SC-aspire (“Hong Kong should aspire to be a smart city and embrace technology”) and SC-tax (“I am willing to pay more in taxes for better technology and smart city services”). The same set of explanatory variables is used for both sets of regressions: five interest variables measuring trust and legitimacy of smart cities and four interest variables controlling for income, education, awareness about smart cities, and ideological views about the role of government. The objective is to reveal the degree to which perceptions about trust and legitimacy impact normative views about the justifiability of publicly funded smart city endeavors.

To analyze the study’s two ordinal dependent variables, all ten models use ordered probit regression (see Agresti 2010, for details about this method). The variables are ordinal in that the survey’s answer options (based on a five-point Likert scale) have a ratio-based order that is structured to be intuitively meaningful to respondents. This reflects the proportionality assumption, which holds that respondents perceive qualitative differences between contiguous answer options as roughly equal and that these differences are consistent across the entire range of options; for example, the difference between “very agree” and “agree” is the same as the difference between “very disagree” and “disagree.” Because the study’s ordinal dependent variables measure perceptions, the use of ordered probit is justified as it enables the estimation of distribution parameters for perceptual variables across a given population (Daykin and Moffatt 2002). Multiple studies use ordered probit to analyze attitudes and perceptions about public policy issues (He 2018; Alcorn, Rupp, and Graham 2017; Woo et al. 2017; Duch, Palmer, and Anderson 2000).

Public trust and political legitimacy are enduring topics for scholarly reflection, and in practice, the current era of global political turmoil underscores their relevance to policymaking. At the same time, continuing breakthroughs in technology have led to increased public investment in smart cities. The technocratic imaginary stakes its political credibility on enhancing transparency, accountability, and effectiveness; these have been seen by governments as building blocks for strengthening trust and legitimacy. However, well-documented public concerns about the use of technology in governance threaten to undermine trust in and legitimacy of smart cities programs. Furthermore, these concerns lay bare the fundamental tensions between technocracy and democracy—a salient issue in an era when the input of experts (e.g., for pandemics and climate change) presents a threat to political regimes that build legitimacy on rhetoric, personality, and gestures or projections of power. At once the currency of expertise and a common basis for policy solutions, technology has a mixed image, disrupting employment and depoliticizing policymaking while transforming how people relate to one another. Furthermore, decades of science- and technology-informed policymaking have not necessarily produced a successful track record in solving complex ecological, social, and economic problems (Hartley 2020).

These issues notwithstanding, hopes for transformational progress are pinned on each successive wave of new technologies, and at the current moment, the fate of cities is said by many technology advocates to rest on the promise of “smartness.” This reveals scholarly opportunities to revisit theoretical debates about state–society relations, power dynamics, and epistemological dilemmas attending the construction of truth about policy problems and “smart” solutions. According to Hartley, Kuecker, and Woo (2019), “technocratization and the data-driven movement are perilously enamored with empiricism as their legacy, reductionism as their problem-framing approach, and initiatives like smart cities as their prescriptions; however, they offer at best an incomplete view of the factors that converge to generate existential crises” (p. 180).

This article has sought to contribute to this conversation by presenting empirical evidence about the legitimacy of and public trust in smart city programs. Given its timing, the survey offers a snapshot of trust and legitimacy in Hong Kong’s pre-NSL era. The baseline data it provides can be compared to the findings of similar surveys in the NSL era. The case of Hong Kong is instructive in that technology and governance are issues with high salience—particularly as the city faces political disruption while seeking to maintain its creative and entrepreneurial vitality. Hong Kong has the resources to commit to smart city programs, the policy capacity and public sector coordination to implement them, and the innovative capacity in public and private sectors to generate a reliable flow of novel policy instruments and solutions. At the same time, the city is in the midst of a half-century-long project to integrate political, administrative, and economic systems with mainland China; this has engendered substantial popular pushback as visible through protests and the election of “antiestablishment” leaders to district councils. It is no unreasonable leap of logic to expect the government’s smart city efforts—for all their policy objectives including security and surveillance—to become targets for political discontent. To better understand these current and potential dynamics, this study has examined the effects of various measures of public trust and legitimacy on support for Hong Kong’s smart cities ambitions.

At a higher theoretical level, this study’s identification of statistically significant relationships between perceptions of legitimacy and smart cities support reflects a theme that is common across discussions about socio-technical imaginaries: loss of democratic control over policy processes captured by elite interests. In returning to the literature review, the finding in the univariate analysis concerning relatively high levels of trust and legitimacy in smart cities (compared to those of security and privacy) can be juxtaposed against pessimistic views in some literature about the political legitimacy of technocratic rationalism. The implication is that it may be possible to separate, as units of analysis when measuring legitimacy, an individual policy from the government that proposes it. This is not without precedent in the literature; Hartley and Jarvis (2020) observe this effect in a Hong Kong–based study about responses to COVID-19. The study found robust public buy-in for precautionary measures, including those imposed by government, despite political antipathy lingering from the 2019 protests. This suggests the need for further research about the legitimacy of policies as distinguishable from that of governments themselves, with Hong Kong an instructive longitudinal case given both the depth and compressed time line of institutional changes concerning the city’s relationship with mainland China. This reflects a level of nuance that has not been thoroughly developed in literature on the political legitimacy of smart cities or technocracy more generally.

Further research is needed to identify mechanisms behind the links identified in this study; this includes qualitative research to address the existence and interplay of policy narratives, longitudinal quantitative research to construct a panel data set for observing how changes in public perception associate with changes in smart city policies and contextual variables (e.g., political tensions), and comparative case studies to examine how meso-level factors (e.g., national and regional economic and political dynamics) and macro-level factors (e.g., the progression of global crises like pandemics and climate change) impact government strategies for building and maintaining trust and legitimacy. Furthermore, as smart city technologies become increasingly sophisticated, further research is needed about the influence these factors on daily personal experiences—including not only opportunities for improving quality of life but also concerns about privacy (e.g., monitoring of behaviors that impact legalities, taxation, and other civic activities). This work should explore why Hong Kong residents appear to have a relatively high level of trust in technology while still harboring concerns about security and privacy in smart city programs. Findings can be compared to those in other cases to determine whether there are factors unique to Hong Kong—social, political, or cultural—that explain differences. Possible hypotheses are that Hong Kong residents consider security and privacy to be managed by the government and that residents consider smart city technology in its technocratic manifestation to be independent from politics. Such an analysis can identify levels of public trust in “apolitical” technocrats relative to that in politicians, offering contextual insights for further studies about how technology interfaces with politics, society, and culture.

In closing, this study also suggests opportunities for deeper reflection about Hong Kong’s postcolonial experience and their effects on notions of citizenship and trust in government. Hong Kong is an illustrative case in that it is shaped at once by a colonial legacy and by the ongoing process of integration with mainland China. Further research should investigate first how these factors individually, and in combination, constitute a meta-narrative that can frame studies about the technology–society interface, and second how these factors at a practical level mediate the relationship between citizens and government technology. Such studies may also be done in a comparative setting, with Macau (likewise having a colonial history) and cities in Guangdong province sharing Hong Kong’s role within the Chinese central government’s Greater Bay Area initiative. Relatedly, future research should also address to what extent perceptions of Hong Kong residents about government technology in Hong Kong are influenced by their perceptions about government technology in mainland China; such research can reveal how social and political context predisposes the public to support or reject smart city programs. An understanding of these issues is important and timely given the recently accelerated process of integration between Hong Kong and mainland China.