Digital Governance as Political Evaluation: Party Perceptions, Technopolitical Agendas, and Vote Choice in Greece

This paper investigates how citizens perceive political parties’ stances on digital governance and technological progress, and how these perceptions relate to political characteristics and electoral behavior. Using original survey data from 500 citizens in Greece, the study examines digital governance as an emerging dimension of political evaluation and party competition. Although political parties increasingly address issues of digital transformation, innovation, and artificial intelligence, citizens’ interpretations of these agendas remain underexplored. Existing research often assumes that technological issues are either low-salience or subsumed under broader ideological divides. This paper instead treats parties’ technopolitical agendas as a distinct evaluative lens through which citizens assess political actors and make electoral choices. The survey includes a dedicated battery of questions measuring citizens’ evaluations of parties’ understanding of technology and AI, the clarity of their digital governance agendas, trust in parties’ use of digital tools and data protection, perceptions of internal participation and meritocracy, and the importance of technology-related issues in party choice. These evaluations are analyzed in relation to respondents’ political interest, institutional trust, governance preferences (people, representatives, or experts), and past vote choice. Methodologically, the paper employs a two-step multivariate design combining Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis. MCA is used to identify the latent dimensions structuring citizens’ evaluations of party technopolitical agendas, revealing contrasts such as competence versus skepticism, innovation-oriented versus risk-averse perceptions, or technocratic versus participatory understandings of digital governance. Cluster analysis then identifies distinct groups of citizens who interpret and evaluate party positions in systematically different ways. The analysis further examines how these technopolitical evaluations connect to vote choice and broader political orientations, shedding light on whether digital governance reinforces existing partisan alignments or introduces new forms of political differentiation. The findings suggest that digital governance constitutes an increasingly meaningful dimension of political competition, contributing to emerging patterns of polarization around expertise, participation, and democratic control. Overall, the paper contributes to the study of party competition and political perception by demonstrating how technological issues are incorporated into citizens’ political judgments. It highlights digital governance as a substantive and symbolic arena through which contemporary political conflicts are increasingly articulated.