An Original Theoretical Model of Digital Institutional Trust Formation in Nigeria’s Emerging Digital Public Service Ecosystem

Trust in digital public services is a fundamental determinant of e-government adoption and digital citizen participation, yet existing trust formation theories were developed in Western institutional contexts and inadequately model the distinctly Nigerian dynamics of institutional trust, including its relationship with perceived government integrity, community social norms, and technology mediating effects. This study develops an original theoretical model of digital institutional trust formation specific to Nigeria's digital public service ecosystem. Through a sequential multi-method design, Phase 1 conducted grounded theory fieldwork involving 60 in-depth interviews with diverse digital service users across Lagos, Abuja, Kano, and Enugu to inductively derive trust formation constructs relevant to Nigerian institutional contexts. Phase 2 operationalised the derived constructs and tested the full structural model on a quantitative sample of 820 digital public service users across six geopolitical zones using PLS-SEM with bootstrapping in SmartPLS 4. The original model integrates cognitive, affective, and social trust dimensions with Nigeria-specific antecedents including community legitimation and ethnic administrative representation perceptions. Available e-government trust literature from Sub-Saharan Africa identifies perceived government corruption and weak institutional accountability as the dominant trust inhibitors not captured in standard trust models. The Institutional Trust Theory by Zucker and the Social Capital Theory provide the theoretical foundation. Findings confirm the model's superior explanatory power over McKnight's trust model for the Nigerian context. The study contributes an original theoretically and empirically grounded digital trust model for the Global South. Keywords: digital institutional trust, e-government, Nigeria, trust formation theory, digital public services.