Securing the Public Sphere? Digital Government and Citizen Engagement in the Gulf States

The 'public' is an overlooked dimension in the study of hybrid regimes and regime stability. Digital government platforms offer an efficient, broad-spectrum and customisable way for these regimes to offer citizen engagement in national policy matters in a structured format. Digital government platforms have seen significant investment from the Gulf states of the Middle East, where they play a foundational role in these states' broader plans for economic and structural transformation. This paper uses a process-tracing approach to demonstrate how direct citizen participation has been widened since 2011 through the introduction of structured digital forms of citizen engagement in state matters. The cases of Absher (Saudi Arabia), Mgovernment (the United Arab Emirates), and the National Portal (Bahrain) reveal that these platforms reconcile distinctive and diverse state formation experiences of both the past, present and future in order to embed a new type of reciprocal trust between citizen and state, institutionalised in a digital, rather than physical form.