Social identity and trust in internet-based voting adoption

The growth of eGovernment applications has initiated profound re-engineering of numerous citizen-government interactions but has not yet provided significant impacts on internet-based voting (iVoting). This study examines the role of trust and the technology adoption model (TAM) in influencing citizen intentions to adopt iVoting, and whether a social identity perspective may play a role in this individual decision process. The study is based on the integrated trust and TAM model. TAM posits that people choose to adopt a new Information Technology (IT) because they perceive it to be useful and sometimes also because it is perceived as easy to use. Trust plays a central role in building that sense of perceived usefulness in cases where the IT is a conduit to the trusted party, as we propose for iVoting. In support of this social identity extension to the trust and TAM model, our results show that citizens' perceptions that they share the same values as the individuals affiliated with providing eGovernment (and internet-based voting) services are especially instrumental. The perception that the agency is made of “people like me” is associated with increased trust in the agency, which in turn is associated with increased levels of other factors that contribute to the intention to vote electronically over the internet. Implications for theory and practice are identified.