Challenged Democracies: The Impact of Digital Government on Democracy and Democratic Institutions

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    Vice or Virtue? Exploring the Dichotomy of an Offensive Security Engineer and Government “Hack Back” Policies
    (2020-01-07) Withers, Kim; Parrish, James; Ellis, Timothy; Smith, James
    In response to increasing cybersecurity threats, government and private agencies have increasingly hired offensive security experts: "red-hat” hackers. They differ from the better-known “white-hat” hackers in applying the methods of cybercriminals against cybercriminals and counter or preemptively attacking, rather than focusing on defending against attacks. Often considered the vigilantes of the hacker ecosystem, they work under the same rules as would be hackers, attackers, hacktivists, organized cyber-criminals, and state-sponsored attackers—which can easily lead them into the unethical practices often associated with such groups. Utilizing the virtue (ethics) theory and cyber attribution, we argue that there exists a dichotomy among offensive security engineers, one that appreciates organizational security practices, but at the same time violates ethics in how to retaliate against a malicious attacker.
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    Municipal Government Use of Social Media: An Analysis of Three Chinese Cities
    (2020-01-07) Gu, Tiejun; Harrison, Teresa M.; Zhu, Yani
    To investigate the use of information dissemination and public communication by Chinese municipal governments, we analyzed the social media use of three large cities with relatively mature social media development: Shanghai, Nanjing and Chengdu. We collected 4,429 government posts and users’ likes, shares and comments from Weibo accounts of each city’s information office. Government posts were coded into 7 types and 16 topics. We used cross-tabulation, correlation analysis and multivariate linear regression to analyze government posts, user responses and their inter-relationships. Chengdu has issued the most posts, while Nanjing has received the highest average user response to posts and exhibited the best signs of success in communication between the government and citizens.
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    Does Online Political Participation Reinforce Offline Political Participation?: Using Instrumental Variable
    (2020-01-07) Sung, Wookjoon; Jang, Changki
    The purpose of this study is to investigate whether online political participation can predict the strengthening of offline political participation by using privacy concerns as an instrumental variable. Accordingly, the 2SLS analysis was applied using the Korea Media Panel Survey data of 2016 conducted by the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI). As a result, age and ideological inclination were found to be more important factors in offline political participation than by socioeconomic status. In addition, the use of an instrumental variable to control the direction of causality indicates that online political participation reinforces offline political participation. As a result of habituated daily online activities, it is suggested that a new participatory group, especially low socioeconomic strata, may be mobilized due to the influence of online political participation. This research eliminating the possibility of two-way causality between online and offline political participation is meaningful in finding that online participation activities can reinforce offline political participation and that it is possible to mobilize the groups that were alienated from offline political participation.