Search results

This paper aims to put the focus on political disaffection that the voters may have and its impact on their resistance to the changes, thereby influencing intention to adopt Internet voting. This study also examines the impact of perceived risk and technological skills on the trust of the Internet technology and informal networks, such as social influence and media influence on the trust of the government.

To empirically test the model, an online survey is administered to 851 people who are eligible to vote.

The findings show that positive media influence and social influence also significantly impact trust in government but trust in government does not necessarily decrease resistance to change and positively impact intention to adopt eVoting. Also, the resistance to change was shown to significantly influence the intention to use Internet voting.

A primary potential limitation of this study is the use of convenience sampling, which may lead to self-selection bias that limits the generalization of our research to all citizens.

Government institutions, as well as political parties, can use the findings of this research to understand how political dissatisfaction such as apathy and cynicism can increase trust in technology and lead to higher participation in online voting.

While the focus on previous literature has been heavily on security and system requirements, this study expands existing research by exploring voting habits, political disaffection, the resistance of change and informal influence on intention to use online voting.

The purpose of this paper is to test a catering theory by examining impacts of minority shareholders’ pressures on earnings management (EM), and attempt to answer: what is the role of minority shareholders participation (MSP) in corporate governance? and does MSP serve as an external monitor to managers, or does it put excessive pressure on them?

Using a novel online voting data set in China’s stock market, the author constructs the measure of MSP, and regress the EM on MSP. To address the endogeneity, the author introduces propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods, instrumental variables, and Heckman estimation to show that the results are robust to different specifications and alternative measures.

The author documents that: MSP plays limited role in external monitoring; and firms facing high MSP levels tend to manage earnings more actively. In addition, information asymmetry, proposals’ importance, managerial incentives, and CEO financial expertise significantly affect firms’ catering behaviors.

This paper contributes to different strands of the literature. First, the finding significantly supports the catering hypothesis from a new perspective of EM. Second, the author contributes to a hotly debated issue in corporate governance: whether minority shareholders should be granted increased participation in corporate decisions? The results also provide timely empirical evidence for government regulators who are concerned about the costs and benefits of granting minority shareholders direct control over corporate decisions.

The purpose of this study is to use role expectation theory to identify potential determinants of user voting avoidance on mobile social media.

Data were collected through a survey of 602 WeChat users, and the proposed model was analysed using structural equation modelling.

Results indicate that user voting avoidance was positively influenced by unfair competition, perceived inauthenticity, perceived information insecurity, over-consumption of renqing (a unique Chinese human relation) and organisation placement in the context of mobile social media.

This study illustrates mobile user voting avoidance from the perspective of role expectation theory and clarifies the importance of avoidance in current voting research.

The helpfulness vote is a type of aggregate user representation that, by measuring the quality of an online review based on certain criteria, can allow readers to find helpful reviews more quickly. Although widely applied in practice, the effectiveness of the voting mechanism is unsatisfactory. This paper uses the heuristic–systematic model and the theory of dynamics of reviews to shed light on the effect of various information cues (product ratings, word count and product attributes in the textual content of reviews) on online reviews’ aggregative voting process. It proposes a conceptual model of seven empirically tested hypotheses.

A dataset of user-generated online hotel reviews (n = 6,099) was automatically extracted from Ctrip.com. In order to measure the variable of product attributes as a systematic cue, the paper uses Chinese word segmentation, a part-of-speech tag and word frequency statistics to analyze online textual content. To verify the seven hypotheses, SPSS 17.0 was used to perform multiple linear regression.

The results show that the aggregative process of helpfulness voting can be divided into two stages, initial and cumulative voting, depending on whether voting is affected by the previous votes. Heuristic (product ratings, word count) and systematic cues (product attributes in the textual content) respectively exert a greater impact on the two stages. Furthermore, the interaction of heuristic and systematic cues plays an important role in both stages, with a stronger impact on the cumulative voting stage and a weaker one on the initial stage.

This paper’s findings can be used to explore improvements to helpfulness voting by aligning it with an individual’s information process strategy, such as by providing more explicating heuristic cues, developing different methods of presenting relevant cues to promote the voting decision at different stages, and specifying the cognitive mechanisms when designing the functions and features of helpfulness voting.

This study explores the aggregative process of helpfulness votes, drawing on the study of the dynamics of online reviews for the first time. It also contributes to the understanding of the influence of various information cues on the process from an information process perspective.

To provide practitioners of information management with an overview and framework to explore the various controversies associated with the methods of traditional methods of voting with electronically enhanced voting via the internet (I‐voting). The current paper is centered on the assumption that I‐voting is the next logical step in applying online information‐gathering and retrieval technologies to the field of e‐government.

A review of the applied literature on electronically enhanced voting methods with potentials associated with internet voting, as well as from practical experience, resulted in a basic model for discussion of the emergent nature of I‐voting.

I‐voting would reduce the cost for staffing polling stations, and also the funds needed to pay for voting machines. I‐voting could also reduce the number of errors made by both the voters and the electoral administrators, and allow for easier adoption of uniform standards in the ballot format, since it could be transmitted via the internet from a central election agency to all local and regional polling places. Bridging the digital divide and internet security issues may be the most important barriers that must be overcome if I‐voting becomes a viable option in the USA.

It may be years, if ever, before a truly secure, relatively risk‐free internet service, such as I‐voting, is developed. However, despite the controversies associated with election fraud, the numerous current voting systems that are in place suffer from the same problems associated with online informational exchanges; but, for the most part, nations still conduct their businesses and the political systems are still relatively stable.

Owing to recent voting débâcles in the USA, the public is demanding a more reliable and secure method of voting. Currently, many nations are moving more toward electronically enhanced voting methods with the long‐term goal being internet voting. Unfortunately, there are heated debates about the pros and cons of handing over the right to vote, using a system that is prone to security risks from outside sources.

In the short term, there should be increased interest in establishing national and international standards for testing and certification of electronic and I‐voting systems and their IT‐infrastructure. It is a basic premise of the present study that voting online increases voter participation, which can only be viewed in a positive light.

To identify the factors that influence adoption of e‐voting services by citizens between the ages of 18‐24.

This study uses Carter and Belanger's (2005) model of e‐government adoption to assess young voters' intention to use an online voting system. The study integrates constructs from technology acceptance, diffusion of innovation, and web trust models. A survey is administered to 208 young voters. The data is analyzed using multiple regression analysis.

Results indicate that user perceptions of compatibility, usefulness, and trust significantly impact their intention to use an electronic‐voting system. The model explains 76 percent of the variance in young voters' intention to use an e‐voting system.

The study only explores the perceptions of one age group. Future studies could use the model to access adoption perceptions of a more diverse pool of citizens.

Government agencies should emphasize the benefits of this electronic service to young voters. If marketed properly, the convenience and compatibility of e‐voting may be influential enough to motivate this normally apathetic demographic to participate in the election process.

This study explores adoption of internet voting by young citizens. An understanding of the factors that influence this demographics' intention to use e‐voting systems can be used to increase voter participation. The findings of this study also lay the foundation for future studies on e‐voting adoption.

As most teachers realize, classroom discussions have limitations including time restraints, reserved participants, or domineering discussants. With the advent of Web 2.0, the opportunities for class discussion have expanded to include synchronous and asynchronous discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Discussion forums, as an extension of classroom discussions and activities, allow teachers to target multiple social studies skills while giving students opportunities to expand their own historical understandings via peer interaction. Whether the goal is to address specific historical thinking skills or push students to think about what it means to be an active citizen in a diverse society, discussion forums can play an integral role in the development of students’ understanding of society. I describe the reasons for expanding discussion into these new mediums and provide examples of students’ online discussions. Recommendations are offered for teachers who would like to begin using discussion forums in their own classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the risks associated with online voting and to compare them with more traditional voting modes.

A modified version of the Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE) approach from the CERT Coordination Center® at Carnegie‐Mellon University is used for developing a framework for comparing threats for different stakeholders. In addition, these risks and threats are quantified, offering an opportunity to conduct a multi‐mode risk analysis in a manner independent of the underlying voting modes. The framework is exemplified using data from officials who had been involved in an actual municipal election, in which registered voters were given the option of voting through the Internet.

What is instructive in the context of this study is that the “low‐tech” threats such as large‐scale mail theft of election notifications and family member coercion may in fact be significant for Internet voting, and the sensationalized threats mentioned by the media may pale in comparison in terms of vulnerabilities.

Conclusions drawn from applying the methods may be very sensitive to parameters chosen for quantification, especially since estimates of probabilities of threats may vary in order of magnitude.

This paper demonstrates a quantitative and comparative analysis for Internet voting, something which does not seem to be adequately addressed in the literature.

In an effort to increase turnout at elections the UK government has been piloting electronic voting. At the 2002 local elections five councils tested remote Internet voting for the first time. Swindon Borough Council conducted the largest pilot, offering remote Internet voting to all voters. Almost 15,000 voters were surveyed as to their motivation for choosing their voting method. Turnout did increase by 3.5 per cent but it is impossible to state conclusively that this was due to the availability of the Internet voting option, since most Internet voters were already regular voters. Future pilots should allow a more conclusive assessment of the impact on turnout of remote Internet voting.