Online voting in Estonia: Disentangling the effects of trust in government and e-voting systems

By making voting easier and more accessible, e-voting has the potential to help strengthen the relationship between citizens and the state. This is particularly relevant in the current context of declining political participation and distrust in political institutions. Previous research explaining why e-voting “works” in Estonia has pointed out the widespread trust in public institutions as the strongest predictors of e-voting, albeit with mixed results. Scholarly literature on trust argues that public confidence in e-voting systems encompasses both citizens’ trust in the state organizing the elections and citizens’ trust in the e-voting technology. However, how these dimensions affect citizens’ confidence in e-voting – either separate or in unison – is still unknown. In this paper, we take on the difficult task of testing which dimension matters the most by studying the role of trust in public institutions in Estonia, a successful case of digitalization in electoral participation. We depart from the idea that confidence in e-voting is a multidimensional construct that is based on relevant characteristics of both the system (e.g., reliability, predictability of the online voting system) and the trustee himself (e.g., the government), and test the influence of either one separately. Using an original preregistered survey experiment (N = 1500) administered around the 2023 election in Estonia, we test (1) whether an increase (decrease) in trust is leads to an increase (decrease) in the likelihood to vote online compared to in-person; and (2) whether trust in the government or in the voting system matters most for this effect. Manipulating both dimensions of trust simultaneously enables us to disentangle the extent to which trust matters for the use of – and confidence in – e-voting systems, and which dimension of trust drives this effect. Data collection is completed and full results will be presented at the conference. As such, the study’s findings will provide important insights about citizens’ attitudes as well as the circumstances in which technology can foster or damper political participation.