Crowdsourced Politics: The Rise of Online Petitions and Micro-Donations

This book focuses on online petitioning and crowdfunding platforms to demonstrate the everyday impact that digital communications have had on contemporary citizen participation. In doing do, the book argues that crowdsourced participation has become normalised and institutionalised into the everyday repertoires of citizens and their organisations. Within the digitally-enabled shift in individual acts of participation, creating, signing and sharing online petitions and micro-donations have become a focal point because of the clear evolution from their offline and online counterparts. To illustrate their arguments the authors use an original nationally representative survey on acts of political engagement, undertaken with Australian citizens. Additionally, through detailed interviews and analysis of their web presence they show how advocacy organisations use online petitions within their repertoire of strategic actions. Lastly, they analyse the kinds of policy issues that mobilise citizens on crowdsourcing platforms, based on a unique dataset of 17,000 petitions from the popular non-government platform, Change.org. They contrast these mass public concerns with the policy agenda of the government of the day to show there is a disjuncture and general lack of responsiveness to this form of citizen expression. Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures List of Tables 1 Why Do Online Crowds Matter for Contemporary Citizen Engagement in Public Policy and Politics? New Modes of Participation Participation Is Digital Crowdsourcing Connected Citizens and Ideas Data Sources Chapter Outline References 2 Who Signs and Shares Petitions and Donates Money Online? Contemporary Political Engagement Is Digital Why Do People Sign Petitions? A Normalised Form of Engagement Who Signs and Shares Petitions? What Are Micro Donations, Their Emergence and Who Donates? Petition Signing Patterns on Change.org Conclusion: Who Signs and Shares Petitions and Donates Money Online? References 3 How Do Political Organisations Use Online Petitioning and Crowdfunding? The Emergence and Consolidation of Crowdsourced Participation Online Platforms: From Parliaments to People Crowdsourcing by Established Political Organisations An Online Platform Perspective: Organisational Traces in Change.org Petitions? Direct Traces Indirect Traces Conclusion: Implications of the Use of Crowdsourced Politics for Organisations References 4 What Kinds of Issues Do Citizens Successfully Raise via Online Petitions? The Issue Agendas of Petition Campaigns Evaluating Successful Campaigns Multi-dimensional Mediation of Petition Success: Sign-ons, Social Media Sharing and Media Attention Conclusion: Importance of Issues and Success to Petition Campaigns References 5 Why Do Personal Narratives and Stories Matter for Online Political Engagement? Storytelling and Crowdsourced Politics Storytelling to the Digital Crowd Storytelling about the Digital Crowd Comparing Storytelling on Change.org and Pozible Measuring the Presence of Storytelling Platform Effects on Storytelling Conclusion: Importance of Storytelling to Digital Crowdsourced Politics References 6 Does Online Citizen Engagement Matter for Reinvigorating Contemporary Politics? Contemporary Citizen Participation Theorising the Challenge from Crowdsourced Politics References References Index This book focuses on online petitioning and crowdfunding platforms to demonstrate the everyday impact that digital communications have had on contemporary citizen participation. It argues that crowdsourced participation has become normalised and institutionalised into the repertoires of citizens and their organisations. To illustrate their arguments the authors use an original survey on acts of political engagement, undertaken with Australian citizens. Through detailed interviews and online analysis they show how advocacy organisations now use online petitions for strategic interventions and mobilisation. They also analyse the policy issues that mobilise citizens on crowdsourcing platforms, including a unique dataset of 17,000 petitions from the popular non-government platform, Change.org. Contrasting mass public concerns with the policy agenda of the government of the day shows there is a disjuncture and lack of responsiveness to crowdsourced citizen expression. Ultimately the book explores the long-term implications of citizen-led change for democracy. Ariadne Vromen is Professor of Public Administration at the Australian National University. Darren Halpin is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. Michael Vaughan is post-doctoral researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Freie University Berlin