New ways of voting in elections are being sought by electoral administrations worldwide who want to reverse declining voter turnouts without increasing electoral budgets. This paper presents a novel approach to cost accounting for multi-channel elections based on local elections in Estonia. By doing so, it addresses an important gap in the academic literature in this field. The authors confirm that internet voting was most cost-efficient voting channel offered to Estonian voters. IMPACT This paper presents a new, proven methodology for calculating the cost-efficiencies of various ways of voting. The authors provide rare data on electoral costs, including costs ranging from stationery to depreciation costs and provide a detailed cost breakdown of activities. The findings will have direct practical implications for electoral management bodies and policy-makers around the world.

(2020). Debate: safeguarding democracy during pandemics. Social distancing, postal, or internet voting—the good, the bad or the ugly?. Public Money & Management. Ahead of Print.

This paper focusses on the use of technology to improve democracy, comparing the cases of Estonia and Catalonia. Both examples are closely related in their use of technology to further democratize the decision-making processes, but have opposite starting points. Estonia’s internet voting system is an offshoot of the comprehensive e-governance system developed by the Estonian government. It is meant to make it more convenient for people to vote and, thus, easier for them to take part in elections. In Catalonia, the online participation system Decidim, initially set up in the city of Barcelona, represents a bottom-up project that emerged from the 15 May protests and aims to make the representative democratic system more direct and participatory. In our comparison we approach both paradigmatic cases from a theoretical reflection on the ideal types of democracy in relation to how decisions are made and by whom. Both projects have evolved and integrated new features that draw them together. First, internet voting is able to reach wider portions of society and digitally transform the Public Administration. Second, online participation platforms increase the potential for collecting citizens’ proposals and enriching discussions. These features make them more like a mixed model which, in the current model of representative democracy, creates spaces for a more direct and deliberative democracy.

This concept paper contextualises, defines, and systematises the concepts of trust and distrust (and their interrelations), providing a critical review of existing literature so as to identify gaps, disjuncture, and continuities in the use of these concepts across the social sciences and in the context of the consolidation of the digital society. Firstly, the development of the concept of trust is explored by looking at its use in different disciplines —e.g. sociology, psychology, law, and management— and then confronted with that of distrust, often regarded—somewhat simplistically—as its opposite. Secondly, the review invites a reflection on the suitability of current definitions of trust and distrust when applied to the implementation of current data-driven technologies (dis/trust in technology) and their workings (dis/trust through technology). The discussion is relevant and timely, not only given the renewed interest in finding the touchpoints between dis/trust and digital-related issues but also to provide a benchmarking overview on this topic, which is still lacking in current literature.