Claudia Zucca: The Role of Trust in Technological Devices for Electoral Decision-Making.

The presentation aims at understanding the relevance of trust in technological devices for political decision-making. The circumstances under which the information reaches the user of a specific device and how this affects the decision-making process will be analysed with a special focus on the role played by the trust of the user in the device she is using. The research questions and hypotheses will be addressed by using Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) generated data and resorting to experimental designs. Despite the fact that a vast literature concerned with decision-making, technology, media effects and the role played by trust already exists, the political science literature has not agreed on a common definition of trust in relation to the use of technology. Furthermore, there is virtually no prior research on the role of trust as a moderator of the influence of the information provided by media for political decision-making, and no study addressing the measurement of trust specifically for VAAs. The original contributions of my final dissertation will therefore fill relevant gaps in the scholarly literature in this area.