Why Vote if it Takes Me More Than 30 Minutes? The Impact of Internet Voting on Reducing the Cost of Electoral Participation

Declining levels of turnout have become characteristic to most of the developed world. Remote internet voting is expected to alleviate the problem. Given that people can comfortably choose the time and place to cast their votes with this voting method it should make voting clearly more convenient, thus easing political participation. This should apply especially for citizens for whom voting is relatively more costly. In this paper we link literature of electoral costs to internet voting and develop a theoretical model by which internet voting reduces the costs of participation and motivates people to use it. We test our model on the basis of Estonian internet voting data comprising eight post-election studies between 2009 to 2019. Findings suggest that indeed, high electoral costs hinder traditional participation, which in turn, motivates people to opt for internet voting as a means to reduce these costs. Paradoxically, however, the cost saving has a strong effect on switching from paper to internet voting, but marginal effect on switching from non participation to voting. Internet voting thus makes voting easier for the already voting citizens and does not really mobilize non-voters – effects on turnout are thus marginal.