Digital government, trust and cynicism: An empirical analysis of social capital and the use of technology by governmental institutions

Digital government resources are being implemented in the United States (and the world) at an increasing pace. In Robert Putnam's widely cited work, Bowling Alone, the Harvard Political Scientist who is housed in the Kennedy School of Government focuses considerable attention on television viewing as an inhibitor of social capital formation. Replacing human interactions with television watching is argued to reduce the amount of social capital that will arise within a community;This doctoral dissertation investigates the question of whether participating in digital government activities and one's satisfaction with digital government has a predictive effect on community-level social capital formation.;Using two different data sources, the Stowell Datasets of Washington State University and the Pew Internet and American Life eGovernment Survey, this dissertation develops a measure for community-level social capital and uses it as an independent variable in relation to both individual-level trust in government, preferences for different types of digital government activities, use of different types of digital government resources and whether respondents perceive digital government as being an improvement in communicating with different levels of government: Federal, State and Local.;Along with salient demographic variables, this dissertation looks at whether digital government is increasing, decreasing or doing neither in the arena of community-level social capital. The findings reported here indicate that digital innovations associated with e-government are having neither the negative effects many critics had feared nor the dramatic positive outcomes many proponents had hoped for from innovations in information technology applied to government.;The reality is both more complex than either of these groups predicted, and more interesting to study. The generational differences found within the impact of e-government are of particular interest in this regard and are well documented here.