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.
Author(s): Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 148
City: Cham
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
