Publication details
Nastal čas elektronických voleb? Usnadnění volební participace prostřednictvím snížení ceny za hlasování
| Title in English | Is there an epoch of e-voting? Facilitating electoral participation by means of lowering the cost of voting |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Evropská volební studia |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Political sciences |
| Keywords | voter turnout; cost of voting; e-voting; institutionalism |
| Description | The democracy offers citizens many opportunities to participate in their own governance. One of them, voting, is often introduced as the lifeblood of the representative democracies. But in past few decades, the problem of low turnout has arisen. In my article, I discuss the issue of growing abstention from the institutional perspective. The rational choice theorists have suggested that people who chose not to vote were acting rationally in that the costs associated with voting (such as rearranging work schedules, getting to the polls, and gathering information on the candidates) appeared to outweigh the benefits (influencing the outcome of an election or gaining the satisfaction of being a good citizen). Here, I assume that lowering the costs can bring significant turnout increase. As the Estonian example has shown, the interesting institutional tool for reducing the expense of casting a ballot might be electronic voting. In the Czech Republic, e-voting has been already used as a source of legitimacy of academic self-government or as a useful tool of intra-party democracy. But meanwhile, the potential of e-voting in national or local elections was not sufficiently utilized. |