The academic debate on e-voting in a socio-political context
Anne‐Marie Oostveen, Peter van den Besselaar · 2019
Computer-based voting as a field of research and societal debate emerged in the early 2000s. Starting in the ‘old democracies’ in Europe and North America, it has spread to other parts of the world. The question is whether research and the academic debate on electronic voting is related to the sociopolitical context in which it takes place. In order to examine this, we retrieved from the Scopus database all papers that relate to internet voting to answer the following research questions: Is there an increased scientific interest for evoting in emerging democracies? Is the approach towards e-voting different between ‘old’ and ‘emerging’ democracies (i.e. technical, political, economical, social) and in terms of evaluation of e-voting (i.e. positive, negative)? We find that developed democracies have a more balanced approach in terms of disciplinary attention and in terms of evaluation of e-voting than the emerging democracies and the hybrid and authoritarian regimes. Africa deviates from this, with comparable substantial social science research being conducted on evoting.