Sustainable urban governance: how digital platforms shape whole-process youth participation intention and behavior

As digital transformation empowers sustainable urban governance, digital whole-process democracy provides an institutional mechanism to mobilize youth participation and promote sustainable development at the grassroots level. However, existing research has not explained how digital platforms influence young people's participation intention and behavior. Drawing on the cognition-affect-conation (CAC) framework, technology acceptance model (TAM), and theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study constructs a parallel mediation model to explain how digital platforms shape whole-process youth participation intention and behavior.

This study employs a mixed-methods approach combining behavioral data, a questionnaire survey, and semi-structured interviews to examine whole-process youth participation on a digital platform. Behavioral data from the urban message board platform are collected first to provide empirical evidence of digital participation. In addition, a questionnaire survey is administered to test the impact of digital platforms' perceptions on youth participation intention. Semi-structured interviews are conducted to explore factors that facilitate the translation of participation intention into actual behavior.

The results show that (1) Digital platforms provide low-threshold participation channels that span the entire governance process. However, youth participation remains uneven. (2) Youth's perceived usefulness and ease of use positively influence whole-process youth participation intention throughout the entire sustainable urban governance. (3) Digital political trust and digital political efficacy play parallel mediating roles between digital platforms' perceptions and whole-process youth participation intention. (4) Digital literacy is a crucial factor in transforming whole-process youth participation intention into sustained and actual behavior. This study expands the theoretical boundaries of youth political participation and advances the sustainable modernization of urban governance.

These findings offer new insights into the discourse on the low-threshold effect in digital participation by clarifying the gap between digital channels and sustained participation. The study integrates the TAM and the TPB into the CAC framework, validating and extending the applicability of these theories to contexts of sustainable youth participation on digital platforms. Meanwhile, these results enrich the concept of perceived behavioral control within the TPB. This study provides a new research perspective on how government digital platforms, young people, and the social governance environment can work together to promote sustainable urban governance.