Technopolitical Alignments: Linking Technological Attitudes and Political Profiles in Greece

This paper explores the relationship between citizens’ technological orientations and their political profiles, asking whether attitudes toward technology and digital governance align with political interest, participation, and institutional trust. Based on original survey data from 500 citizens in Greece, the study treats technology not as a politically neutral domain, but as an increasingly salient component of contemporary political alignment. While political behavior research has traditionally focused on ideology, partisanship, and socio-demographic factors, technological change is often conceptualized as an external context rather than an internalized political issue. This paper challenges this assumption by jointly analyzing technological and political attitudes within a single analytical framework. The survey captures citizens’ technological orientations (digital skills, intensity of use, perceptions of digital transition, evaluations of digital governance tools) alongside political characteristics such as political interest, forms of participation beyond voting, trust in key institutions, attitudes toward technology’s impact on democracy, and support for electronic voting. The analysis employs a two-step multivariate approach combining Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis. MCA is used to map the latent dimensions structuring the joint technopolitical space, revealing the principal antagonisms linking technology and politics. These may include contrasts between technocratic trust and democratic skepticism, digitally confident but politically disengaged citizens versus politically attentive but technologically cautious ones, or optimistic versus critical orientations toward technology’s role in democratic governance. Cluster analysis then identifies distinct technopolitical profiles, grouping individuals according to consistent configurations of technological and political attitudes. The findings demonstrate that technological orientations are systematically connected to political dispositions. Rather than cutting across political divides randomly, attitudes toward digitalization and digital governance align with differentiated patterns of political interest, institutional trust, and participation. In particular, support for technology as a democratic enhancer is closely associated with specific forms of political engagement and trust, while technological skepticism often coincides with broader political disengagement or institutional distrust. By empirically linking technological and political attitudes, the paper contributes to emerging debates on technopolitics and contemporary political cleavages. Methodologically, it shows how multivariate exploratory techniques can reveal hidden alignments across domains often studied separately. Substantively, it highlights technology as a meaningful axis of political orientation in digitally transforming democracies.