Party Cues and Trust in Remote Internet Voting: Data from Estonia 2005-2019

Trust is crucial for the adoption and use of new technologies. This paper seeks to advance our knowledge of why people trust or distrust disruptive electoral technologies such as remote internet voting. It argues that because of the complexity of the systems in question, most potential users are unable to form independent opinions on the system's trustworthiness and are likely to rely on cues provided by trusted social actors such as their preferred political parties. The paper develops a set of hypotheses from this conjecture, and tests these with survey data on approximately 5200 Estonian voters in the context of 11 elections held between 2005 and 2019. The findings suggest that partisan attachments are an important determinant of trust in e-voting and that the partisan gap in trust cannot be reduced to differences in socio-demographic voter profiles. Our results, however, do not support the conjecture that less educated individuals are particularly likely to take cues from their preferred parties when assessing the trustworthiness of e-voting.