Urban digital twin governance readiness and institutional trust: Panel evidence from the EU

<ns5:p>Background Urban digital twins are increasingly used to support data-intensive planning and public-service governance, but their public acceptability cannot be explained by technical performance alone. This study examines whether national governance conditions that may support urban-digital-twin-oriented public services are associated with institutional trust in the European Union. Methods The study constructs an Urban Digital Twin Governance Readiness Index combining user centricity, key digital enablers, transparency and rule of law. It uses a balanced panel of 27 EU Member States from 2022 to 2025, drawing on Standard Eurobarometer, European Commission eGovernment Benchmark, World Justice Project and Eurostat data. The analysis applies pooled panel models, two-way fixed effects, Mundlak decomposition and feasible generalised least squares, with robustness checks using alternative trust outcomes, excluding 2025 and replacing the self-constructed index with the official eGovernment composite score. Results In the pooled specification, a ten-point increase in governance readiness is associated with a 1.56 percentage-point increase in trust in regional or local public authorities. Comparable positive associations are observed for trust in national government, the European Union and the European Commission. However, fixed-effects and Mundlak within-country estimates do not identify a significant short-term association. The efficiency and legitimacy dimensions, their interaction and the efficiency-legitimacy gap are also not statistically significant in within-country models. Conclusions Digital governance readiness and institutional trust coexist across EU Member States as part of broader national governance configurations. The available four-year panel does not support a causal claim that short-term readiness improvements generate trust gains. Urban digital twins should therefore be governed as public digital services embedded in institutional safeguards, rather than as technical systems whose legitimacy follows automatically from optimisation or visualisation.</ns5:p>