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Replication Data for: Distance and Trust: An Examination of the Two Opposing Factors Impacting Adoption of Postal Voting among Citizens Living Abroad

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Distance and Trust: An Examination of the Two Opposing Factors Impacting Adoption of Postal Voting among Citizens Living Abroad
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TQLKOJ
 
Creator Nemčok, Miroslav
Peltoniemi, Johanna
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Postal voting intends to provide citizens residing abroad a convenient voting technique to influence political representation in their country of origin. However, its adoption among individuals is dependent on two opposing factors: On the one hand, voting via post helps to overcome increasing distance between voter’s residency abroad and the nearest polling station organized by a diplomatic mission (mostly at an embassy or a consulate). On the other hand, this way of voting requires also enough trust that the postal service and designated state office will successfully deliver one’s vote all the way to the ballot box, because the result cannot be effectively verified without violation of the ballot secrecy. We examine the interaction of these two factors in an originally conducted survey among Finnish citizens residing abroad fielded shortly after the 2019 Parliamentary elections—the first occasion after Finland put postal voting into effect. Altogether 664 respondents provided responses to all questions required for our specification of binomial logistic regression models controlling for various potential confounders. The results demonstrate that trust in postal voting moderates the impact of distance on one’s probability to adopt postal voting – while low trusting emigrant voters remain largely indifferent regardless of the distance to the nearest polling station, medium trusting non-resident citizens tend to increasingly mail their ballots via post when the nearest polling station is more than 100 kilometres away. High trusting individuals begin to increasingly do so already when they are more than ten to 30 kilometres away.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Postal voting
vote-by-mail
trust
distance
emigrants
Finland
political geography
 
Contributor Nemčok, Miroslav