Culture and Trust in the Adoption of Electronic Voting: A Look at the USA and South Africa

Abstract

Trust is a cornerstone of society, and it enables democratic institutes. It captures people’s expectations about others’ (the trustees) socially-acceptable behavior. In the context of information technology (IT) adoption, trust also increases the perceived usefulness (PU) of IT associated with the trustee’s agency. One way of increasing this trust is through greater sociocultural similarity. Extrapolating based on previous research to the realm of electronic voting, this chapter posits that because trust is culture-dependent, it should decrease considerably as cultural diversity and differentiation increases. To investigate the role of trust in IT adoption in different cultures where dissimilar concepts of socially-acceptable behavior exist, this study compares trust-related perceptions of an emerging IT, namely electronic voting, between the United States of America (USA) and the Republic of South Africa (RSA). More specifically, the question was addressed by comparing the unique circumstances of the cultural changes in the RSA with the more socially-integrated mainstream USA culture. In both cultures, perceived sociocultural similarity between the individual and the agency in charge of the electronic voting IT contributed to both the establishment of trust and to an increase in the perceived usefulness of the IT, supporting and extending the extrapolations of past propositions to this new realm. However, only in the USA did trust contribute to the PU of the IT. The results suggest that when cultural diversity is large, trust becomes of lesser importance, perhaps because it can no longer reduce social uncertainty. Implications for researchers and governmental voting agencies are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.