Past research has confirmed the importance of structural and individual-level factors in predicting voter turnout and citizen trust in the government. In international research particularly, political corruption has been shown to negatively affect citizen trust, though the effect of corruption on voter turnout is mixed. To date, no research has examined the effect of corruption on voting and government trust in the United States over a relatively long period of time. In this dissertation, I aim to answer two primary research questions: how U.S. corruption affects voting and how it affects citizen trust in the government. Using many sources of data for state-level variables, and the American National Election Study (NES) for individual-level variables, I investigate these relationships using multilevel modeling (MLM) of forty-six states and approximately 22,000 individuals in my analysis of voting and forty-one states and about 7,000 individuals in my analysis of political trust. I find that corruption has a small, but significant, negative effect on voting. Surprisingly, I find no effect of corruption on a citizen’s political trust, even after assessing the impact of corruption on four other specifications of trust. I also investigate cross-level interaction effects for each analysis, and find no significant results. I conclude with a discussion of possible explanations for these findings, make policy recommendations with the knowledge gained from this research, and offer suggestions for future investigations.

Because of the advent of the Internet, traditional journalism is changing. Advanced technology includes the tools for everyone to publish their thoughts, feelings, photos, and videos, allowing individuals to be citizen journalists. This experimental-design study was aimed at discovering the influence of biographies in people's judgments of the credibility and professionalism of news articles. The study involved four treatments 1: professional journalist feature article with professional journalist biography; 2: citizen journalist feature article with professional journalist biography; 3: citizen journalist feature article with citizen journalist biography; and 4: professional journalist feature article with citizen journalist biography. These treatments were used to determine how the 198 study participants judged the work and biography of a traditional journalist compared to the work and biography of a citizen journalist. Study data was acquired through an online survey. A credibility scale and a professionalism scale were used to determine that, based on the articles used in the study, news consumers do not see professional journalists as more credible than citizen journalists, although news consumers do see traditional journalists' content as more professional.

This is a qualitative exploratory, descriptive study to ascertain the feasibility of public administrators at the local government level using an Appreciative Inquiry approach to increase direct citizen participation. It is framed by the interpretive paradigm. Twenty city managers or their designees from cities of between 40,000 and 250,000 citizens were interviewed. Specifically, respondents were asked twelve semi-structured interview questions. Content analysis was used to identify six themes in the data. Ultimately, this study found that Appreciative Inquiry may be useful in limited circumstances as long as barriers to implementation were adequately addressed. However, the potential risks may outweigh the benefits. / Ph. D.

Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) occur due to the excessive growth of algal in waterbodies such as lakes, rivers, and ponds. The cyanotoxins produced by HABs are harmful to wildlife, animals, and humans when ingested or exposed. Due to the toxic and rapid growth of HABs, it is essential to assess potential causes of HABs over broad geographical scales. This observational study aims to understand the spatiotemporal patterns and drivers of HABs across the State of Illinois using both regular environmental monitoring and citizen science datasets from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA). The Ambient Lake Monitoring Program and the Illinois Clean Lakes Program regularly conduct chlorophyll-a measurements, collectively referred to as the ALMP + ICLP dataset. Similarly, the Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) organizes volunteer citizens to collect Secchi-disk measurements, known as the VLMP dataset. Machine learning algorithms including Random Forest, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine are used to evaluate HABs and trophic states of HABs based on nine meteorological variables, six lake morphological variables, and eight land use and land cover variables. The data characteristics found the Cook county area consisted of over half of the total VLMP observations. The meteorological variables were most important for accuracy and classification in the Random Forest modeling, and the VLMP dataset performed the best at trophic state classification, and the Random Forest model performed the best overall compared to the other machine learning models. This study concludes that the VLMP is a beneficial and comparable tool when coupled with the ALMP + ICLP data for HAB monitoring in Illinois.

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Civil society is a widely discussed concept, often proposed as a means to address problems associated with a weakening of the social fabric. Nearly all civil society literature works from the notion that creating more or richer discourse around any given issue will help build agreement about the key values and in so doing, civil society will emerge. What this literature has not yet turned its attention to is, what is necessary for a strong social bond, which is a prerequisite for the possibility of social discourse in the first place, to exist. Historically, the social bond has been built on common religious, cultural and/or political perspectives. However, the constitutive power of the institutions that comprise each of these areas has diminished substantially. This research draws on concepts developed in the field of environmental psychology to understand how place can serve as the basis for the development of a social bond and subsequent emergence of civil society. Two concepts drawn from environmental psychology -- place attachment and place identity -- are used to demonstrate how individuals and groups become connected to place, and how such a connection shapes and contributes to social relations. Specifically, this study contributes to the body of civil society literature by illuminating how a public agency can foster the development of the social bond by drawing explicitly and symbolically on place and in doing so, contributes to the emergence of civil society -- or on the other hand, fails to foster it as effectively as it could by being attentive to the role that place can play in creating the social bond. / Ph. D.

Yes / Sluggish adoption of emerging electronic government (eGov) applications continues to be a problem across developed and developing countries. This research tested the nine alternative theoretical models of technology adoption in the context of an eGov system using data collected from citizens of four selected districts in the state of Bihar in India. Analysis of the models indicates that their performance is not up to the expected level in terms of path coefficients, variance in behavioural intention, or the fit indices of the models. In response to the underperformance of the alternative theoretical models to explain the adoption of an eGov system, this research develops a unified model of electronic government adoption and tests it using the same data. The results indicate that the proposed research model outperforms all alternative models of technology adoption by explaining 77 % of variance in behavioural intention, with acceptable values of fit indices and significant relationships between each pair of hypothesised factors.

No / The study explores the adoption of an electronic government (e-government) system called online PAN card registration system (OPCRS) in context of India. The study validates the extended theory of reasoned action (TRA) to understand the impact of some of its factors on the citizen's intention to adopt this system. The proposed research model is extended with the variables including perceived usefulness, perceived trust, and self-efficacy as antecedents of attitude and subjective norm, which are the core constructs of the TRA. The eight hypotheses were formulated between six constructs of the proposed extended TRA. The proposed research model is validated using the usable sample of data gathered from 377 respondents. The data was analysed using AMOS 22.0. The empirical findings of the proposed research model indicated the significant relationships of all proposed hypotheses. The study also provides its limitations, future research directions, and implications for theory and practice toward the end.