Doctoral Defence: Bogdan Romanov “Explaining trust in Internet voting: institutional, technological, and contextual determinants”

On 23 April at 14:30 Bogdan Romanov will defend his doctoral dissertation “Explaining trust in Internet voting: institutional, technological, and contextual determinants” for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Political Science).

Supervisors:

Associate Professor Mihkel Solvak, University of Tartu
Dr Margarita Zavadskaya, The Finnish Institute of International Affairs (Finland)

Opponent:

Senior Lecturer Micha Germann, University of Bath (United Kingdom)

Summary:

This dissertation examines how citizens form and maintain trust in Internet voting, a technology that allows ballots to be cast securely online. While such systems symbolize progress and digital efficiency, they also raise new questions about transparency, security, and institutional reliability. Estonia, the first and so far, only country to conduct nationwide online voting for more than two decades, provides a unique environment to study these dynamics. By also including a comparison with Russia, the research highlights how political context and public discourse influence the ways people interpret and engage with election technologies.

The dissertation consists of four interconnected studies. The first investigates how citizens’ knowledge and confidence affect their reliance on institutional trust when deciding whether to vote online. The second combines expert interviews and Q-methodology with voters to reveal how everyday experience with digital services fosters trust, while distrust grows from perceptions of confusion, political bias, or limited communication. The third compares public attitudes toward Internet voting in democratic Estonia and authoritarian Russia, showing that trust is grounded in distinct motivations: civic duty and state loyalty in autocracies versus perceived convenience and procedural fairness in democracies. The final study demonstrates that institutional trust, meaning the belief that state authorities act competently and fairly, plays a stronger role in explaining both trust in and actual use of Internet voting than purely technological factors do.

Taken together, these studies show that trust in Internet voting is not simply a reaction to technical reliability but a reflection of broader relationships among citizens, institutions, and political narratives. Trust develops within specific regime settings and through public discourses that define what is seen as legitimate or risky in digital governance. Sustaining such trust therefore requires more than secure code; it depends on transparent communication, accountable institutions, and an open societal conversation about how democracy evolves in the digital age.