Election-Campaign Law

The intense and ever faster development of the internet, with its ever deeper penetration into every day life of citizens throughout the world did not stop at the doors of one of the most fundamental institutions of democracy: elections. For over a decade, public authorities at all levels of the state have been experimenting with solutions allowing its citizens to register and cast their vote by electronic means. The most radical forms of electronic voting encompass completely remote ways of casting one?s vote from any computer connected to the internet. By now, myriad elections took place in which parts or even the entire electorate was allowed to cast such electronic ballots. However, political science is still trying to catch up with the trend towards internet-enhanced elections. In particular comparative studies ? both across time and cases – are still very rare. Partly, this is so because of the lack of aggregate and above all individual level data through which it is possible to shed new light on the effects of the introduction of internet voting on the voter, on parties, on electoral procedures and on campaigns. This situation has, however, changed over the past few years and studying internet voting becomes more frequent. This panel aims at bringing together the most recent papers on internet voting and its effects on politics. We would like to attract papers that have a strong theoretical background and are empirically measuring to what extent the introduction of internet based voting affects modern, liberal democracy.