E-Gov

Professor Mossberger has recently published a book co-authored with Caroline Tolbert and Ramona McNeal on Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation. “Digital citizenship,” is the ability to participate in society online, and it facilitates opportunities for knowledge, skills, and participation in the economic and political spheres. This work builds on an earlier book, Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide (Mossberger, Tolbert and Stansbury, Georgetown University Press, 2003), which examined patterns of inequality and the attitudes, needs, and experiences of those left behind. Digital Citizenship extends this previous research by showing the consequences that technology has for political and economic participation, and by connecting these issues to citizenship and equality of opportunity, beyond economic arguments about the positive externalities of technology.

Diffusion and Impact of E-government

In their article ( Public Administration Review, 2006), Tolbert and Mossberger explore the effects of e-government use on citizen attitudes toward government more generally. Using two-stage models and Pew survey data, they find that there is a statistically significant relationship between trust in government and use of a local government website. In general, e-government users had positive assessments of all levels of government as being more transparent, responsive, or efficient. The findings are theoretically important for reconciling previous conflicting research on the effects of e-government, and for understanding variations by level of government.