The introductory chapter introduces students to contemporary issues in public administration research like Covid-19, environmental problems, social equity, public service motivation, and general challenges in public service.These contemporary issues and challenges have been identified by the National Academy of Public Administration.The chapter discusses how data can be manipulated to tell a particular side of a story. Therefore, data and research ethics are also covered. Students are introduced to ethics in human subjects research and associated best practices.

The notes in this appendix provide a brief and limited overview of R syntax, semantics, and the R package system, as background for working with the R code included in the text. It is intended for use alongside R help pages and the wealth of tutorial material that is available online.

Novel, largely artificial-intelligence-driven technologies have become more widely accessible in recent years. This, combined with the rising dominance of social media as a primary source of news and the “weaponization” of information for political and other purposes, has led to increases in the forgery and manipulation of the evidential basis of factual claims. How easy is it for us to know when the evidentials that we rely upon to assess something as “fact” have been undermined? This chapter examines different types of evidential forgery and manipulation and describes the technological, social, and cognitive challenges we face in identifying these undermined evidentials. The chapter also explores what happens if we do become aware that the evidentiary underpinnings of our facts might be untrustworthy, and asks what threat this uncertainty poses to the epistemic foundations of societal trusting relations.

Computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional records and recordkeeping for the physical record, undermining practices centered on the “moral defense” of the record and supplanting them with practices centred on datafication. Prioritizing data malleability rather than the defense of information from manipulation and corruption has, this chapter argues, contributed to the current diminution of the trustworthiness of information and an unravelling of society’s evidentiary foundations. Fields such as archival science and the law have long considered questions of how records may testify to the events and actions of which they form a part – serving as proofs of claims, that is, as evidentials – but research in the field of computing has only relatively recently focused on these issues. Despite its roots in computing culture, blockchain technology offers the promise of an immutable ledger that may halt the processes of datafication contributing to the current widespread potential for manipulation of records. The design and spirit of blockchains – offering the ability to cryptographically “fix” the record, chaining it in place so that any tampering is extremely difficult and immediately evident – harks back to a pre-digital past when the materiality of paper records more readily fixed in place transactional “facts” and protected their integrity from manipulation.

Reducing air pollution, a leading cause of death, has become a critical goal worldwide. However, the degree of success has varied greatly, even in the same locality over time. Theories and empirical studies so far mainly explain the static existence of pollution. The major social science explanations for the existence of pollution are: (1) sacrificing environmental quality at the altar of the economy; (2) pursuing short-sighted environmental planning; and (3) exploiting information asymmetry to weaken environmental monitoring and enforcement. However, they do not explain the systematic temporal variation in environmental policy implementation. This book fills this critical gap and takes a different view than the existing works regarding several factors that explain reported changes in air quality, namely the manipulation of air quality data by subnational officials and the effect of ad hoc, top-down implementation campaigns on actual air quality. The rest of the chapter provides an overview of the mixed methods used, intended audiences, and a roadmap for the book.