E-voting in developing countries: Current landscape and future research agenda

Abstract

The rate of e-voting implementation in developing countries is too significant to ignore, yet the lack of theoretical common ground has resulted in dispersed ways of perceiving the technology. The objectives of this paper, therefore, are twofold: (1) providing a thematic landscape and defining the state of the current research on e-voting in developing countries, and (2) propounding courses for future research on e-voting which emphasize social, organizational and technological accounts of the technology. Following a systematic examination of sixty seven articles, this work found that the current studies have inclined towards technological centrism and that the question is no longer ‘why’ but ‘how’ to fit e-voting concepts and theoretical constructs into the various contexts of developing democracy. There is also evidence to suggest that system design studies have often been conducted without sufficient effort allocated for the strategic design of e-voting initiatives. This paper thus argues that future research on e-voting in developing countries should be focused on drawing the holistic image of reciprocal relationships between social and technical aspects of the technology. As a consequence, future studies must perceive e-voting not as a mere technological means but rather as a complex socio-technical agent that plays an important role in social and political reforms. They need to be more critical of the motives behind e-voting initiatives and conservative in following established development frameworks.