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Birds of a feather petition together? Characterizing e-petitioning through the lens of platform data
Abstract
E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some lawmakers and scholars to enhance citizen participation in political decision-making. In addition to social media and other channels for informal political communication, online petitioning is regarded as both a useful instrument to afford citizens a more important role in the political process and allow them to express support for issues which they find relevant. Building on existing pre-internet systems, e-petitioning websites are increasingly implemented to make it easier and faster to set up and sign petitions. However, little attention has so far been given to the relationship between different styles of usage and the causes supported by different groups of users. The functional difference between signing paper-based petitions vs. doing so online is especially notable with regard to users who sign large numbers of petitions. To characterize this relationship, we examine the intensity of user participation in the German Bundestag’s online petitioning platform through the lens of platform data collected over a period of five years, and conduct an analysis of highly active users and their political preferences. We find that users who sign just a single petition favor different policy areas than those who sign many petitions on a variety of issues. We conclude our analysis with observations on the potential of behavioral data for assessing the dynamics of online participation, and suggest that quantity (the number of signed petitions) and quality (favored policy areas) need more systematic joint assessment.
... Research has consistently differentiated between government, non-governmental/NFP, and commercial platforms (Wright 2015b). A great deal of attention has been paid to governmental sites such as the 'Downing Street' petitions in the UK (Wright 2012), 'We the People' site in the US (Dumas et al. 2015), and the petitions site of the Bundestag (Puschmann, Bastos, and Schmidt 2017). Another important distinction is between organisation-led online petitions (such as those pioneered by online campaigning organisations MoveOn, Avaaz and GetUp) and citizen-created petitions. ...
... We will also not use the term clicktivism to describe online petition engagement due to the continuing pejorative connotations; and do not want to confuse the analysis, as we are studying an online petition platform with the unit of analysis being petitions, and individual actions being mobilised within that context. Second, another thread of recent research focuses on petitioners 2 as the unit of analysis (see Jungherr and Jürgens 2010;Puschmann, Bastos, and Schmidt 2017). Here scholars puzzle over what proportion of all signatures are accounted for by a small number of 'super participants' (Graham and Wright 2014). ...
... We chose not to strictly apply the actual numerical thresholds in the work of others, simply because as the time periods included in studies varies so too will the utility of thresholds. Wehave a larger data set than Puschmann, Bastos, and Schmidt (2017), and the top and tail of our distribution is of a different magnitude. ...
Online petitions are an important feature of contemporary political engagement in advanced democracies. In this paper we report on a unique data set – covering a five year period and over 17,000 petitions – documenting the development of the Change.org platform in Australia. Australia presents an interesting case as, until very recently, there was no national government hosted online petition site. Our analysis results in three findings that advance scholarship on online petitions. First, we find the majority of petitions are in fact targeted at government, and that their issue area is of a political nature. Second, we find that most signers of petitions sign a single petition – they are not serial participants. Finally, we show that ‘super users’ of the online petition system engage broadly as well as often. Together these findings demonstrate that online petition creation and signing – even on commercial platforms – is a distinct and important part of citizen engagement in politics.
... Extant studies on online petitioning-mostly in the field of communication sciences, media and internet studies and political science-often focus on its effectiveness; particularly on the effectiveness of public petition systems that have been put into place in many states, on the political use of online petitions, on the advocacy groups, and on the circulation of the petitions (e.g. Wright 2015;Puschmann et al. 2016;Halpin et al. 2018). In their analysis of online petitions, Boure and Bousquet (2011) highlight a number of elements to be taken into account: the context of the petition, the multiple parties (its promoters, mediators and signatories), the technical interface, the circulation of the petition and its reception. ...
Wikipedia represents the largest online encyclopedia worldwide. Its participatory functions enable its users to create entries dynamically and collectively. This may lead not only to convergence, but also to conflict at the micro-level of the contributions of individual users and in the interaction at the meso-level of the Wikipedia community. This study analyses Wikipedia’s sites for negotiating convergence, conflict and identity, concentrating on two aspects. First, convergence and conflict at the macro-level of intercultural comparison are investigated using the example of the construction of concepts of nationalism, citizenship, identity and tribe in their English and German language versions. Second, the English articles serve as a basis to examine the types of convergence and conflict tendencies at the micro-level of the Talk-section. The findings are interpreted against the background of the identity construction of single authors and on the meso-level of the Wikipedia community.
... This latter point was re-enforced in a follow-up study using more recent UK e-petition data that suggested an e-petition's fate in terms of popularity was decided in the first 24 h of its launch (Yasseri et al., 2017). Beyond the sheer popularity of some epetitions, Puschmann, Bastos, and Schmidt (2016) investigate the behaviour of signatories of e-petitions, identifying classes of signers. These range from "Singletons" who signed just one e-petition through to the "Hyperactive" who contributed nearly 10% of signatures but made up just 0.1% of signatories. ...
Many legislators around the word are offering the use of web based e-petitioning platforms to allow their electorate to influence government policy and action. A popular e-petition can gain much coverage, both in traditional media and social media. The task then becomes how to understand what features may make an e-petition popular and hence, potentially influential. One area of investigation is the linguistic and topical content of the supporting e-petition text. This study takes an existing methodology previously applied to the American government's e-petition platform and replicates the study for the United Kingdom's equivalent platform. This allows an insight into not only the United Kingdom's e-petition process but also a comparison with a similar platform. We find that when assessing an e-petition's popularity, the control variables are significant in both countries, e-petitions in the United Kingdom are more popular if some named entities are used in the text, and that topics are commonly more influential in America.
... Dalton, 2004;Norris, 2011), legislatures worldwide are developing new participatory mechanisms to promote greater engagement with representative institutions and to provide additional opportunities for citizens to influence policymaking. Perhaps the most popular innovation is the parliamentary e-petition and a burgeoning body of scholarship has provided important insights concerning the scale of use (Escher and Riehm, 2017;Puschmann et al., 2017), the petitioner experience (Bochel, 2016;Carman, 2010;Leston-Bandeira, 2019;Wright, 2012), and the extent that petitioning bridges the democratic divide (Asher et al. 2019;Åström et al. 2017;Carman 2014;Linder and Riehm 2011). Nonetheless, relatively little is known about whether political elites are listening to petitioners. ...
Responding to the crisis of democracy, legislatures worldwide are developing new participatory mechanisms to promote parliamentary engagement and provide additional opportunities for citizens to influence policymaking. Yet despite the prevalence of such initiatives, little is known about whether political elites are receptive to public input. This article addresses this important gap, presenting original research that examines the e-petition system in the United Kingdom’s national legislature. It demonstrates significant apathy – on occasion, antipathy – on the part of Westminster’s elected MPs. In particular, it reveals concerns that parliamentary e-petitions risk undermining the relationship between MPs and their constituents; inundating the parliamentary agenda with immediate, but not necessarily important, issues; and exacerbating misunderstandings of the parliamentary process. More broadly, political elites remain sceptical about the capacity of parliamentary e-petitions to address the democratic divide, with a widespread sense that e-petitions often amplify the voices of those who already shout the loudest.
... Many studies focus just on petitions' participatory potential, such as Mosca and Santucci (2009). Also, within this axis, Wright (2012) assesses Downing Street's potential as a democratic good, Yasseri et al (2017) explore the dynamics of online mobilisation of e-petitions, whereas Jungherr and Jürgens (2010), Lindner and Riehm (2011) and Puschmann et al (2017) are but three examples of studies analysing the characteristics of petitioners and signatories, investigating whether e-petitioning has led to different participation patterns. Implicit in this plethora of studies is an assumption about the roles performed by petitioning, but no discussion of these. ...
Legislatures around the world are experimenting with online petitions as a means of enabling the public to express policy preferences. In some countries they have attracted an extraordinarily large number of signatories, but it is often unclear what, if anything, they achieve. This article addresses this important question through an analysis of the UK parliament’s e-petitions system. Drawing on a review of historical and comparative research, it develops a new analytical framework which identifies four potential types of roles – linkage, campaigning, scrutiny and policy. Our study shows that although a large proportion of e-petitions to the UK parliament are rejected and only a very small number lead to specific action, they nevertheless play important roles. Some have performed campaigning or scrutiny roles, but their primary effect has been to facilitate public engagement.
... Puschmann et al. analyse the content of petitions submitted to the German Bundestag and find different policy issues attract signatures from different types of signatories. Some issues, like 'Labour' and 'Transport', are dominated by signatories who have signed many petitions whilst others, like 'Science', are dominated by 'sporadic' signatories (Puschmann, Bastos, and Schmidt 2017). Hagen et al. report a similar result studying petitions submitted to the USA government. ...
In times marked by political turbulence and uncertainty, as well as increasing divisiveness and hyperpartisanship, Governments need to use every tool at their disposal to understand and respond to the concerns of their citizens. We study issues raised by the UK public to the Government during 2015-2017 (surrounding the UK EU-membership referendum), mining public opinion from a dataset of 10,950 petitions (representing 30.5 million signatures). We extract the main issues with a ground-up natural language processing (NLP) method, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We then investigate their temporal dynamics and geographic features. We show that whilst the popularity of some issues is stable across the two years, others are highly influenced by external events, such as the referendum in June 2016. We also study the relationship between petitions' issues and where their signatories are geographically located. We show that some issues receive support from across the whole country but others are far more local. We then identify six distinct clusters of constituencies based on the issues which constituents sign. Finally, we validate our approach by comparing the petitions' issues with the top issues reported in Ipsos MORI survey data. These results show the huge power of computationally analyzing petitions to understand not only what issues citizens are concerned about but also when and from where.
... Many studies focus just on petitions' participatory potential, such as Mosca and Santucci (2009). Also, within this axis, Wright (2012) assesses Downing Street's potential as a democratic good, Yasseri et al (2017) explore the dynamics of online mobilisation of e-petitions, whereas Jungherr and Jürgens (2010), Riehm (2011) andPuschmann et al (2017) are but three examples of studies analysing the characteristics of petitioners and signatories, investigating whether e-petitioning has led to different participation patterns. Implicit in this plethora of studies is an assumption about the roles performed by petitioning, but no discussion of these. ...
Legislatures around the world are experimenting with online petitions as a means of enabling the public to express policy preferences. In many countries they have attracted an extraordinarily large number of signatories, but it is often unclear what, if anything, they achieve. This article addresses this important question through an analysis of the UK Parliament’s e-petitions system. Drawing on a review of historical and comparative research, it develops a new analytical framework which identifies four potential types of roles - linkage, campaigning, scrutiny and policy. Our study shows that although a large proportion of e-petitions to the UK Parliament are rejected and only a very small number lead to action, they nevertheless play an important role. Some have performed campaigning or scrutiny roles, but their primary effect has been to facilitate public engagement.
... Wright, 2015b) but researchers are beginning to use such systems as a source of secondary data analysis (Briassoulis, 2010) and to undertake computational social science investigations (Jungherr & Theocharis, 2017). Uses have included examining the lifecycle of e-petitions (Yasseri, Hale, & Margetts, 2013), the pattern of engagement with e-petitions (Huang, Suh, Hill, & Hsieh, 2015;Puschmann, Bastos, & Schmidt, 2016), analysis of e-petition text ; the initial support (C. Dumas et al., 2015a) and triggered counter response (C. ...
The United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union is perhaps one of the most important recent electoral events in the UK. This political sentiment has confounded pollsters, media commentators and academics alike, and has challenged elected Members of the Westminster Parliament. Unfortunately, for many areas of the UK this referendum outcome is not known for Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies, rather it is known for the coarser geography of counting areas. This study uses novel data and machine learning algorithms to estimate the Leave vote percentage for these constituencies. The results are seen to correlate well with other estimates.
... Allgemein lässt sich erkennen, dass von einer typischen Long-Tail-Verteilung der aktiven Twitterer ausgegangen werden kann, dass also ein sehr kleiner Anteil der Twitterer für einen sehr großen Anteil der Tweets verantwortlich ist. Diese sehr aktiven Teilnehmer werden nicht nur in Bezug auf Twitter, sondern auch im Kontext anderer Online-Beteiligungsmöglichkeiten u. a. als "Lead User" (Bruns & Stieglitz, 2014) oder "Heavy User" (Ziegele u. a., 2013), als "highly active" oder als "hyperactive" (Puschmann, Bastos & Schmidt, 2017) bezeichnet. ...
Twitter ist für Journalisten zu einer wichtigen Informationsquelle geworden und findet auch unter Politikern Anklang als informelles Stimmungsbarometer öffentlicher Meinung. Dabei kann die Reflektion über die Aussagekraft der in dem Kurzmitteilungsdienst relevanten Themen und Meinungen schnell in den Hintergrund geraten. Das birgt die Gefahr, dass journalistische Berichterstattung, die durch dort abgebildete Wirklichkeiten inspiriert wurde, weit von der direkt erfahrbaren Lebenswelt der Bevölkerung entfernt ist. Es stellt sich daher die Frage, inwieweit das auf Twitter beobachtbare Stimmungsbild potenziell dem der Bevölkerung entsprechen kann. Indikatoren dafür können soziodemographische, politische und persönlichkeitsbezogene Merkmale sein. In der vorliegenden Studie werden Menschen, die sich regelmäßig privat auf Twitter äußern, untersucht und mit einer repräsentativen Stichprobe erwachsener Internetnutzer in Deutschland verglichen. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass sich aktive Twitterer in demographischer, politischer und vor allem in Hinsicht der Persönlichkeitsmerkmale vom Durchschnitt der Internetnutzer unterscheiden. Das Stimmungsbild auf Twitter wird im Vergleich eher von Persönlichkeiten geprägt, die höhere Werte in der Tendenz zum Narzissmus aufweisen, die persönlichkeitsstärker, extrovertierter und weniger ängstlich sind. Eine Orientierung an den Meinungen und Trends auf Twitter kann daher verzerrte Relevanzrahmen und Stimmungsbilder suggerieren, welche mit denen der Gesamtbevölkerung nur wenig zu tun haben.
... Proposal 6: The research needs for empirical work 1. There has been increasing interest towards online petition systems in political science [9,80,108,109] and at SIGCHI community [48,67]. The work on political science community has highlighted the importance of petitions not for changing the policy but to change the political agenda and inform citizens [9,109]. ...
This is a manuscript I'm working to map the HCI work touching democratic decision making.
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Political events throughout the Western societies have created great concerns about the sustainability and stability of the society. How can the SIGCHI community address part of these concerns in the digital society? A systematic literature review on SIGCHI's work on democracy, politics and civic topics is conducted. After limiting the review to topics related to political decision making, a total of 46 papers were reviewed. Following findings can be summarized. The published papers focused more on developing new systems and practices and less on observations and case studies. Roughly equal number of papers advocated liberal-individualist and deliberative models of democracy. These findings demonstrate the need for further integration of political science knowledge, such as the work on democratic innovations, to the field of SIGCHI. At the same time, the political science community could apply the design-driven research to rethink the e-democracy systems developed.
We argue that the increasing availability of digital trace data presents substantial opportunities for researchers and policy makers to better understand the importance of social networks and social interactions in fostering economic opportunity and resilience. We review recent research efforts that have studied these questions using data from a wide range of sources, including online social networking platform such as Facebook, call detail record data, and network data from payment systems. We also describe opportunities for expanding these research agendas by using other digital trace data, and discuss various promising paths to increase researcher access to the required data, which is often collected and owned by private corporations.
The increasing number of e-petition services requires accurate calculation methods to perform rapid and automated delivery. Automated text classification significantly reduces the burden of manual sorting, improving service efficiency. Moreover, existing text classification methods focus on improving sole models with an insufficient exploration of hybrid models. Moreover, existing research lacks combinatorial model selection schemes that yield satisfactory performance for petition classification applications. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid deep-learning classification model that can accurately classify the responsible department of a petition. First, e-petitions were collected from the Chinese bulletin board system and then cleaned, segmented, and tokenized into a sequence of words. Second, we employed the word2vec model to pretrain an embedding matrix based on the e-petition corpus. An embedding matrix maps words into vectors. Finally, a hybridized classifier based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) is proposed to extract features from the title and body of the petition. Compared with baseline models such as CNN, Bi-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM-CNN, the weighted F1 score of the proposed model is improved by 5.82%, 4.31%, and 1.58%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed automated petition classification decision support system is available on the e-petition website and can be used to accurately deliver petitions and conduct citizen opinion analysis.
Beyond voting, donating money to a cause and signing a petition are now the most frequent acts of political engagement for citizen voice in many advanced democracies. But we still do not fully theorise or empirically understand these crowdsourced forms of political engagement. Who donates money and signs petitions? And why? These everyday forms of engaged participation differ from conventional participation aligned with formal politics, parties and politicians, both in terms of demographics, and being driven by cause and crowd-driven opportunities. Most now see online petitioning as a normal and efficacious part of democratic expression. These digitally enabled participatory acts are underpinned by the sharing of social information into existing online social networks. Crowdfunding, also known as the mobilisation of micro donations, is growing as a phenomenon: both at the individual micro level as well as the meso level via organisational uptake.KeywordsOnline petitionsSharing petitionsDonationsCrowdfundingVoiceSocial information
The rapid growth of online petitioning has been propelled by the emergence of internationally influential platforms like Change.org. Yet there has been little systematic analysis of the kinds of policy issues that petitions cover. Are they aligned with the policy agenda of the government of the day? Or are they personalised issues with no political claims whatsoever? And how does this matter to seeing petitions as a new site for successfully mobilised public opinion and government responsiveness? Using an original dataset of 17,000 petitions started on Change.org in Australia, and hand coded for policy area using the Policy Agenda Codebook, we show that over 70% of petitions have a direct policy focus. Somewhat surprisingly, we find no clear pattern of post-material policy areas being dominant over redistributive, material politics. We argue that the disjuncture between petition topic agendas and governmental policy agendas is a challenge to harnessing citizen engagement into contemporary governance.KeywordsPolicy issuesPolicy agendasGovernment responsivenessCampaign successOnline petitionsChange.orgMedia
The rise of new digital platforms and crowdsourced digital practices has inevitably affected the practice of more traditional political advocacy organisations and interest groups. This chapter presents an analysis of the nexus between formal politics, advocacy and interest group organisations and crowdsourced tactics. With the exception of the USA, the United Kingdom and Germany many democratic governments have been slow or half-hearted in starting their own online petition portals. Our interviews with meso level platform organisations and analysis of 1300 advocacy organisations also show an increased focus on deploying new practices to engage and mobilise organisational membership. However, these portals do not attract the same level of interest and mass participation as petitions from popular not-for-profit platforms like Change.org. We argue that formal organisation—the meso level context and macro-level context of the political system—still matters, even for understanding episodic, crowdsourced, connective exemplars of participation—like petition or crowdfunding campaigns.KeywordsAdvocacy organisationsInterest groupsGovernment petition platformsChange.orgWebsitesPost-materialism
In South Korea, the Advance Notice Legislation (ANL) system requires by law that a public announcement be issued on any proposed bill that is likely to affect the fundamental rights, duties, and/or daily life of the general public. By investigating the effects of public dissent submitted via the online ANL system in South Korea, this study attempts to address the critical issue of how to increase citizen participation in the political process and to offer a possible strategy that modern democratic governments can employ in this regard. The findings suggest that citizens will actively participate in the political process to make their voices heard when an appropriate participatory mechanism is available, but they will be more active if the administration encourages citizen participation with various policies and institutions. In other words, formal and informal institutions actively interact to affect the behavior of actors both within and outside the political arena.
Ideas about what makes a ‘good citizen’ continue to evolve alongside the digitalisation of political participation. We examine these interrelated trends through an in-depth analysis of the normative basis for contemporary online petitioning. This article uses original survey data in Australia and Germany to confirm the emergence of distinctive ‘contribution’ citizenship norms which emphasise the importance of sharing content through networked communications infrastructures. We then examine the relationship between these novel citizenship norms and online petitioning, differentiating online petitioning along two dimensions of mode (signing versus sharing) and frequency. First, we find ‘contribution’ norms are more associated with sharing online petitions than signing them. Second, ‘contribution’ norms are more associated with high-frequency sharing and signing, as opposed to more casual instances of participation. In combination, these findings show that contribution norms are distinctively associated with more intensive forms of online petitioning (e.g. frequent sharing), while more casual forms (such as casual signing) are supported by a more diverse range of normative orientations. We conclude that the way citizens engage with online petitions reflects, in part, their normative orientation to contributing information towards networked communication infrastructures.
This study explores ideological convergence in an online petition. More specifically, it depicts an echo chamber, composed of the petition text, its updates and comments left by signatories. The petition examined ‘Non, Monsieur Hulot, vous n’êtes pas seul!’ (No, Mr. Hulot, you are not alone!) is an expression of support to the resigned French minister of ecology, Nicolas Hulot, and a general call for ecological action. The data consists of the petition text and nearly 2,000 comments. The study identifies five main functions for the comments: confirmation of signature, self-presentation, (dis)agreement, mobilisation and the circulation of information. The analysis also shows that the main source of ideas and linguistic elements circulated in the comments is the petition text.
En 2009, l’Assemblée nationale du Québec a introduit les e-pétitions. Cette réforme a-t-elle modifié l’agenda parlementaire et contribué à davantage de participation citoyenne ? Il s’avère que les élus ne se sont pas véritablement approprié les nouveaux mécanismes de suivi des pétitions. Seuls des enjeux qui transcendent les clivages partisans ont fait l’objet d’une étude approfondie en commission. Pour attaquer le gouvernement et recueillir des données personnelles, les partis optent plutôt pour leurs propres plateformes. Nous constatons enfin une hausse du nombre de pétitions, sans pour autant que ce phénomène se traduise par une augmentation du nombre de signataires.
La répartition fortement inégale des niveaux d’engagement entre personnes utilisant les sites web de participation citoyenne (e-forums, sites de pétitionnement en ligne, etc.) est l’une des caractéristiques les plus connues de ces plateformes : alors que la majorité de leurs membres n’y participe que très peu, une petite minorité, souvent qualifiée d’« hyper-utilisatrice » ( power users ), y contribue abondamment. Cette minorité est sous-étudiée dans le corpus actuel de recherches portant sur la participation en cyberdémocratie ; cet article vise à combler cette lacune. En nous appuyant sur un jeu de données observationnelles unique, portant sur des centaines de milliers de personnes utilisant une plateforme de pétitions en ligne, nous montrerons que la quantité de temps libre, ainsi que le fait d’avoir eu un premier contact positif avec le site, sont des facteurs en favorisant un usage intensif. Nous montrerons également que les « hyper-utilisateurs et utilisatrices » sont plus efficaces que les membres habituels de ces sites dans leurs entreprises de mobilisation collective, mais que leurs centres d’intérêt diffèrent considérablement de ceux de la majorité utilisant moins intensivement ces sites. Cela signifie, globalement, que ces petits groupes exercent une puissante influence sur ces sites, avec un effet de distorsion à la clé.
This study investigates the link between perceived loneliness and five forms of political participation. A bidirectional re-affiliation model of political action is proposed, stating that loneliness increases the probability for political participation if the political act fosters social belonging and interaction (enhancement hypothesis). However, if the political act has little potential for re-affiliation, a decrease in participation is expected (suppression hypothesis). Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), the study investigates the relationship between loneliness and (1) reported voting behavior, (2) signing petitions, (3) contacting politicians, (4) being a member of a political organization and (5) participating in public demonstrations. The analysis finds strong support for the suppression hypothesis and mixed support for the enhancement hypothesis. With that, the study is one of the first to highlight the importance of perceived loneliness alongside objective social embeddedness as a predictor for political participation. Furthermore, it shows that the relationship cannot simply be generalized to all political acts but is dependent on its potential for social interaction.
Signing e-petitions to foreign authorities received little attention from scholars due to the constraint of the relationship between citizenship and sovereignty. Yet, Taiwanese people constantly attempt to create and sign e-petitions to other authorities, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. The current study aims to examine this phenomenon and proposes a new concept namely international political efficacy to explain their behavior. Expanded from political efficacy, international political efficacy refers to individuals’ perception of their knowledge and experience about international affairs and issues. Meanwhile, the current study develops a dual-pathway model which comprises of rational and emotional routes as the theoretical framework. Through a survey, the findings confirm that emotional route failed to shape the e-petition signing intention, whereas rational and collective action concerns dominated the process. International political efficacy was confirmed valid through empirical data, and it can contribute to the theory development.
Ε-petitions, the digital version of printed petitions, are increasingly being used as complimentary means of nonconfrontational, online citizen mobilization/protest. They attract considerable research interest because they provide (big) data to study e-petitioning and the political and other aspects of socio-spatial issues. E-petition studies lack discussion of ontology, of “what is an e-petition,” implicitly treating e-petitions as “systems-as-a-whole” or, seldom, as relational formations. Acknowledging the foundational role of ontology, Assemblage Thinking (AT) is argued to beget a more judicious approach when e-petitions are employed as research instruments to study the “who-what-when-where-and-how” of a socio-spatial issue and, concurrently, their situated contribution to issue-related decision-making. After presenting the reductionist/essentialist and the nonreductionist/relational approaches to the study of e-petitions and introducing ΑΤ, an assemblage-based framework is proposed that conceptualizes e-petitions as multiplicities comprising assemblages, dynamic compositions emerging from processes of heterogeneous components coming together to serve a purpose. A concomitant methodology is outlined and an illustrative example is offered. The advantages of assemblage-based over reductionist/essentialist approaches for the situated co-analysis of socio-spatial issues and e-petitions are discussed, indicating how they address prominent concerns of the literature, and future research directions are suggested.
One well-known characteristic of participatory websites is that the distribution of contribution levels is highly skewed: most people who make use of the service contribute only a little, but a small minority, often known as ‘power users’, contribute a lot. These power users are understudied in the literature on online democratic participation: this article aims to fill this gap. Based on a unique observational dataset of hundreds of thousands of users of an electronic petitioning platform, we show that having more free time is an important determinant of becoming a power user, as is having a positive initial experience with the site. We also show that power users are both more effective than regular users and that their interests differ substantially from ‘normal’ users: meaning that these small groups have a powerful (and distorting) influence on overall outcomes for the site.
In times marked by political turbulence and uncertainty, as well as increasing divisiveness and hyperpartisanship, Governments need to use every tool at their disposal to understand and respond to the concerns of their citizens. We study issues raised by the UK public to the Government during 2015–2017 (surrounding the UK EU membership referendum), mining public opinion from a data set of 10,950 petitions, which contain 30.5 million signatures. We extract the main issues with a ground-up natural language processing method, latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling. We then investigate their temporal dynamics and geographic features. We show that whilst the popularity of some issues is stable across the 2 years, others are highly influenced by external events, such as the referendum in June 2016. We also study the relationship between petitions’ issues and where their signatories are geographically located. We show that some issues receive support from across the whole country, but others are far more local. We then identify six distinct clusters of constituencies based on the issues which constituents sign. Finally, we validate our approach by comparing the petitions’ issues with the top issues reported in Ipsos MORI survey data. These results show the huge power of computationally analysing petitions to understand not only what issues citizens are concerned about but also when and from where.
The UK Parliament introduced an e-petitions system in 2015 with the aim of
significantly enhancing its relationship with the public. We explore whether this
aim is being met through the analysis of Twitter data from conversations on e-petitions
debated in Parliament. We use natural language processing, machine
learning and social network analysis of Twitter data to explore what it shows
about the extent of people’s engagement, the contents of Twitter e-petition
conversations, who is taking part and how they interact. Our findings provide
interesting insights into how people perceive the e-petition procedures in terms of
fairness and responsiveness, suggesting that petition parliamentary debates should
be more inclusive of the original petitions’ aims. The results also point to
homophily tendencies present in the Twitter e-petition discussions.
In a representative democracy it is important that politicians have knowledge of the desires, aspirations and concerns of their constituents. Opportunities to gauge these opinions are however limited and, in the era of novel data, thoughts turn to what alternative, secondary, data sources may be available to keep politicians informed about local concerns. One such source of data are signatories to electronic petitions (e-petitions). Such e-petitions have risen greatly in popularity over the past decade and allow members of the public to initiate and sign an e-petition online, with popular e-petitions resulting in media attention, a response from the government or ultimately a debate in parliament. These data are thus novel in their availability and have not yet been widely used for research purposes. In this article we will use the e-petition data to show how semantic classes of Westminster Parliamentary constituencies, fitted as Gaussian finite mixture models via EM algorithm, can be used to typify constituencies. We identify four classes: Domestic Liberals; International Liberals; Nostalgic Brits and Rural Concerns, and illustrate how they map onto electoral results. The findings and the utility of this approach to incorporate new e-petitions and adapt to changes in electoral geography are discussed.
This article considers the extent to which petitions and e-petitions might allow citizens to ‘reach in’ to local authorities in the United Kingdom. It examines how e-petitions sit against wider debates about the use of technology and digital democracy and the extent to which petitions systems might align with traditional approaches to representative democracy. It highlights that, as with many other participative initiatives, digital or otherwise, there are a variety of issues and risks associated with e-petitions, including those associated with broad socio-economic factors, and others that are more specifically related to the use of e-petitions. However, drawing on existing examples of e-petitions systems in the United Kingdom, it suggests that, designed well, they may have potential value, not simply in terms of enabling ‘voice’ and participation, but also in helping educate and inform petitioners about local democracy and decision-making.
Over the past two decades, there has been much debate concerning the Internet’s ability to facilitate and support public deliberation and extend the public sphere (cf. Gimmler 2001; Papacharissi 2002; Dahlgren 2005; Coleman and Blumler 2009). The belief that the Internet may play a significant role in reducing some of the deliberative deficit of Western democracies has sparked much interest in the potential benefits and drawbacks of online communication. Following the initial euphoria over the possibility of a ‘new’ Internet-based public sphere, along with its critical response, a growing body of innovative empirical research into online deliberation has emerged in its wake. Scholars have been interested in how citizens use the Internet to express themselves, not only during election time, but also how it is used for political purposes in citizens’ everyday lives. In particular, there is growing research focusing on online, everyday political talk.
Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of them. We show that a noted prominence in networked communication of otherwise unremarkable Twitter users may be an upshot of purposive strategies intended to publicize, support or help orchestrate collective action. Accordingly, we propose the term “engagement compass” to address the relationship between activists' life-patterns and their personal investment in protest over time.
The Logic of Connective Action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated using inclusive discourses such as “We Are the 99%” that travel easily through social media. in many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. in some cases, connective action emerges from crowds that shun leaders, as when Occupy protesters created media networks to channel resources and create loose ties among dispersed physical groups. in other cases, conventional political organizations deploy personalized communication logics to enable large-scale engagement with a variety of political causes. The Logic of Connective Action shows how power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.
This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically coded to provide a typology of serial activists and their struggles with institutionalized power. We found that these users have an ordinary following, but bridge disparate language communities and facilitate collective action by virtue of their dedication to multiple causes. Serial activists differ from influentials or traditional grassroots activists and their activity challenges Twitter scholarship foregrounding the two-step flow model of communication. The results add a much needed depth to the prevalent data-driven treatment of political Twitter by describing a class of extraordinarily prolific users beyond influentials and the twittertariat.
While plenty of research has provided important insights into the uses of the Internet by politicians during elections, a relatively scarce amount of work has looked into these uses outside of such parliamentary events. This article seeks to remedy this lack of research by presenting a study on the ‘routine’ uses of two of the currently most popular social media services – Facebook and Twitter. Focusing on politicians elected to the national parliaments of Norway and Sweden, the article employs novel methodologies for data collection and statistical analyses in order to provide an overarching, structural view of the day-to-day social media practices of Scandinavian politicians. Findings indicate that use levels are rather low for both services – the median amount of tweets sent and messages posted on Facebook is close to one per day. Further analyses reveal that the most active politicians could be labelled as ‘underdogs’, as they are more likely to be younger, in opposition and out of the political limelight.
Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this article, we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying Gaussianization to the data, we found contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted onsite protest during the Indignados and Occupy protests, with bidirectional Granger causality between online and onsite protest in the Occupy series. Conversely, the Vinegar demonstrations presented Granger causality between Facebook and Twitter communication, and separately between protestors and injuries/arrests onsite. We conclude that the effective forecasting of protest activity likely varies across different instances of political unrest.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of electronization in improving the effectiveness of citizens' democratic participation in the context of e‐petitioning. With this aim, the current study worked to ascertain what influences citizens' offline and online petitioning and the extent to which electronization empowers citizens for effective e‐petitioning.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses a case study from Sutharyakeralam meaning “Transparent Keralam” to determine the extent to which e‐petitioning worked for protecting a public irrigation canal in Kerala (India). Data were obtained through in‐depth interviews with relevant government officials, journalists and petitioners who reside near the canal. Secondary data used for the case analysis consist of petitioners' documents. Using a content analysis, this paper assesses citizens' ability to participate and influence decision making.
Findings
Findings illustrate adequate citizen participation before and after the electronization of the grievance redress mechanism. Results also show if there are adequate publicizing facilities, e‐petitions can empower citizens to engage effectively in efforts to fight for their human rights.
Research limitations/implications
The scope of the study is limited to exploring the determining parameters that may improve democratic participation in an issue of environmental pollution. Results imply that adequate policies to ensure the involvement of participants are essential to enable e‐government initiatives to deliver on the ideals of e‐democracy for equity and justice.
Originality/value
Earlier studies on e‐participation were less adequate in explaining the influence of electronization on citizens' capability for effective e‐petitioning. The current study attempts to explore the enablers of effective e‐petitioning. Drawing on the canal case study, arguments are presented that explain the possible success and failure of e‐petitioning initiatives in India.
Political scientists have long been aware of the problem of unequal participation in democratic politics, the phenomenon we can call âpolitical divide.â The emergence of information and communication technologies over recent years has sparked a discussion on whether this long-standing political divide can now be resolved by âe-democracy.â This study aims to answer two questions: (i) Can e-democracy, specifically e-petitions, attract traditional nonparticipants to participate in public affairs? (ii) In the context of promoting e-petitions, can âdigital divideâ alleviate the problem of âpolitical divide?â The data used in this study were collected from a national poll on citizen experience of and willingness to participate in the petitioning for referendum. The results indicate that those who recall participating in paper petitions tended to be older, less educated, and with stronger party identification. Also, our results reveal that these people who can be effectively mobilized by traditional social networks are mostly, in fact, the âdigital have-nots.â Furthermore, regarding the potential participants in e-petitions, we find that those âdigital haves,â who had not been mobilized in previous paper-based petition sessions, were more likely to participate in e-petitions if they are implemented in the future. The results demonstrate the existence of a possible negative correlation between the political and the digital divide. This suggests that e-democracy might be potentially beneficial to alleviate the long worried negative effects of the political divide in democratic polity.
From the Arab Spring and los indignados in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street (and beyond), large-scale, sustained protests are using digital media in ways that go beyond sending and receiving messages. Some of these action formations contain relatively small roles for formal brick and mortar organizations. Others involve well-established advocacy organizations, in hybrid relations with other organizations, using technologies that enable personalized public engagement. Both stand in contrast to the more familiar organizationally managed and brokered action conventionally associated with social movement and issue advocacy. This article examines the organizational dynamics that emerge when communication becomes a prominent part of organizational structure. It argues that understanding such variations in large-scale action networks requires distinguishing between at least two logics that may be in play: The familiar logic of collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, and the less familiar logic of connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks. In the former, introducing digital media do not change the core dynamics of the action. In the case of the latter, they do. Building on these distinctions, the article presents three ideal types of large-scale action networks that are becoming prominent in the contentious politics of the contemporary era.
Collective action taking place on Internet platforms leaves a digital imprint
which may be harvested to better understand the dynamics of mobilization. This
'big data' offers social science researchers the potential for new forms of
analysis, using real-time transactional data based on entire populations,
rather than sample-based surveys of what people think they did or might do.
This paper uses a big data approach to track the growth of about 20,000
petitions to the UK Government over two years, analyzing the rate of growth and
the outreach mechanism. The number of signatures was collected for all
petitions with an hourly resolution. The vast majority of petitions did not
achieve any measure of success; over 99% failed to get the 10,000 signatures
required for an official response, and only 0.1 percent attained the 100,000
required for a parliamentary debate. We analyze the data through a
multiplicative process model framework to explain the growth of signatures. We
have defined and measured an average outreach factor for petitions and show
that it decays very fast (reducing to 0.1% after 10 hours); after 24 hours, a
petition's fate is virtually set.
E-petitions are seen as one response to a perceived decline in public trust of political institutions and the associated symptoms of disengagement. In this paper, some current research into e- petitioning in Europe is reviewed, and the need to understand the context behind the expectations and perceptions of external actors (citizens and petitioners) in the process is considered. Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is presented as an approach which broadens the analysis beyond perceived outcomes and gives prominence to the concept of self-efficacy, and parallels are drawn with citizens' belief in their ability to successfully interact with the political system as a whole. A diagram with an idealised flow is presented and used for consideration of the points at which evaluation data can be collected in this context.
Research has shown consistently that news consumption both online and offline is related positively to interpersonal discussion, political involvement and political engagement. However, little consideration has been given to the role that new sources of information may exert on different forms of political engagement. Based on secondary analysis of data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, this article contrasts the influence of traditional sources of information online with that of emergent sources (blogs) in predicting further political discussion, campaigning and participation in both the online and the offline domains. The results show that the use of traditional sources online is related positively to different types of political engagement, both online and offline. Most interestingly, the article finds that blog use emerges as an equally important predictor of political engagement in the online domain. Its analyses provide support for the contention that asserts the democratic potential of the internet.
Purpose
EPetitioning has been emerging as arguably the most important eParticipation institutional activity. This paper aims to provide some insights into how ePetitions are perceived and supported by social networking sites.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper investigated the connection between the UK Government's ePetitioning system and social networking groups linking to governmental petitions. Online data from Facebook were collected and analysed with respect to numbers of supporters compared to official signatures.
Findings
The results indicate that although the process of signing an official petition is not more complex than joining a Facebook group, the membership of respective Facebook groups can be much higher. In particular, certain topics experienced very high support on Facebook which did not convert to signatures.
Originality/value
The paper's added value lies in the questions raised about the potential uptake of citizen‐government interactions in policy‐making mechanisms.
In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followees significantly corresponds with the message content. We classified our data into twelve topics analogous to traditional newspaper sections and investigated whether the spread of information depend- ed upon the Twitter network of followers and followees. To test this, we mapped the social network related to each topic and calculated the occurrence of retweet and mention messages whose senders and receivers were interconnected as followers and followees. We found that on average 10% of retweets (RT-messages) and 5% of direct mentions between users (AT-messages) in Twitter hashtags are sent and received by users interconnected as followers and followees. These figures vary considerably from topic to topic, ranging from 15%-19% within Technology, Special Events and Politics to 3%-5% within the categories Personalities and Twitter-Idioms. The results show that hard-news messages are retweeted by a considerably larger community of users interconnected as followers and followees. We then per- formed a statistical correlation analysis of the dataset to validate the classification of hashtag in news sections based on retweet connectivity.
In their article "Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal About Political Sentiment," the authors Andranik Tumasjan, Timm O. Sprenger, Philipp G. Sandner, and Isabell M. Welpe (TSSW) the authors claim that it would be possible to predict election outcomes in Germany by examining the relative frequency of the mentions of political parties in Twitter messages posted during the election campaign. In this response we show that the results of TSSW are contingent on arbitrary choices of the authors. We demonstrate that as of yet the relative frequency of mentions of German political parties in Twitter message allows no prediction of election results.
Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this paper we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger-causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying a Gaussianization procedure to the data, we found that contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted onsite protest during the Indignados and Occupy protests, with bidirectional Granger-causality between online and onsite protest in the Occupy series. Conversely, the Vinegar demonstrations presented Granger-causality between Facebook and Twitter communication, and separately between protestors and injuries/arrests onsite. We conclude that the effective forecasting of protest activity likely varies across different instances of political unrest.
The e-readiness indexes measured by accessibility and content have typically been employed in e-government website evaluations. We present empirical evidence from four e-readiness indexes (such as accessibility, e-information, e-petition and e-participation) and the clickstream website usage data of the Korean central government units from 2003 to 2005 to evaluate whether better e-readiness induces more use of e-government websites. We find that only the e-information index was significantly correlated with website usage, and the majority of usage variations were attributable to the unit-specific effects including the nature of each unit’s public service. Our findings also indicate that the accessibility index should not be considered a key factor to evaluate e-government websites any longer, and the traditional supply-side e-government content evaluations may provide misleading information on e-government evolution.
Points for practitioners
Traditional supply-side e-government evaluations may not reflect citizens’ actual needs and use of e-government services. The e-government deployment across different units should take account of each unit’s nature of public services.
This article examines critically the claims that digital networks (digital media infrastructures, especially social media platforms) fundamentally change the conditions of politics over the longerterm. Without doubt digital networks enable faster political mobilization, accelerated cycles of action, and some new forms of collectivity, but how consequential is this in the longer-term when set alongside other longer term consequences of a digitally saturated environment? The author argues that some leading accounts of digital media’s contributions to political change operate with a thin account of the social, the sort of thin account that historically has been supplemented by
media’s mythical accounts over the past century of their role in supplying social knowledge. In the digital age, even the most detailed and rigorous accounts of digital networks’ contributions to political action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013) fail to show that those networks also facilitate longer-term political action that builds longer-term political transformations: arguably, the resulting acceleration of action encourages short-term loyalties and less stability in political socialization.
However, this limitation of existing accounts tends to be masked by a new myth for the age of digital networks: the myth of ‘us’, which encourages us to believe that our gatherings on social media platforms are a natural form of expressive collectivity, even though it is exactly that belief that is at the basis of such platforms’ creation of economic value. The article deconstructs that myth, as the starting-point for more satisfactory future accounts of digital networks’ possible contributions
to political change.
E-Petitions have become an important aspect of political participation via the Internet, allowing citizens to publicly support political issues. This paper reports findings from a study on the E-Petition Platform of the German Bundestag, combining an analysis of the platform's database (period: October 2008 to January 2013; n = 2,653 petitions) and an online survey among the platform users (Fieldtime: August/September 2013, n = 244 participants). It reports findings on signature patterns over time as well as between different topical areas, among them evidence for a very uneven distribution of signatures across petitions, for a “spill-over effect” where popular petitions draw attention to the platform to the benefit of other petitions, and for a higher activity of male users. The study also investigated the effect of the introduction of the pseudonymous co-signing option in 2012: No significant change in the amount of signatures was observed, but the majority of co-signers are having a pseudonym rather than their real name displayed in the public list of signatures. This seems to be mainly a “default effect”, but results from the survey also show that users consider pseudonymous signatures as serious as real-name support.
Anecdotes of past social movements suggest that Internet-enabled technologies, especially social media platforms, can facilitate collective actions. Recently, however, it has been argued that the participatory Internet encourages low-cost and low-risk activism—slacktivism—which may have detrimental consequences for groups that aim to achieve a collective purpose. More precisely, low-threshold digital practices such as signing online petitions or “liking” the Facebook page of a group are thought to derail subsequent engagement offline. We assessed this postulation in three experiments (N = 76, N = 59, and N = 48) and showed that so-called slacktivist actions indeed reduce the willingness to join a panel discussion and demonstration as well as the likelihood to sign a petition. This demobilizing effect was mediated by the satisfaction of group-enhancing motives; members considered low-threshold online collective actions as a substantial contribution to the group’s success. The findings highlight that behavior that is belittled as slacktivism addresses needs that pertain to individuals’ sense of group membership. Rather than hedonistic motives or personal interests, concerns for the ingroup’s welfare and viability influenced the decision to join future collective actions offline.
The increasing use of Twitter by politicians, journalists, political strategists and citizens has made it an important part of the networked sphere in which political issues are publicly negotiated. The growing number of studies investigating the relationship between Twitter and politics supports this claim. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first study that examines the interrelation of individuals on the basis of their professions, their topics and their connection to mass media. Taking the example of Austria, they developed a user-centred method that overcomes the limitations inherent to other approaches in this field. The different types of data they gathered – Twitter user data, 1,375 newspaper articles and manually coded 145,356 tweets – allowed them to perform several analyses which provided insights into the structure and topics of a national public Twittersphere. Their results show that the network formed by Austria's most relevant political Twitter users is dominated by an elite of political professionals but open to outside participation. The topic analysis reveals the emergence of niche authorities and the periodic divergence of the political discourse on Twitter with that of mass media. The article concludes with a summary of how these phenomena relate to political participation.
Opportunities to examine how policy shapes eParticipation have so far been limited. This study assesses the requirement for local government authorities in England to have provided an online petitioning facility by the end of 2010. Based on an analysis of 353 web sites, the findings show that the impact of this policy was ambiguous: compliance was achieved, but most systems were only basically implemented and attracted limited use. Institutional variables were very influential in this outcome.
Despite a long history, petitioning parliament is widely considered to be ineffective. With a view to enhancing their effectiveness, a number of legislatures have recently conducted reviews of their petitions systems. This article explores the outcomes of these reviews. It also considers the function of legislative petitions systems, what makes an effective system and, ultimately, what impact legislative petitions systems have on policy outcomes. In terms of their role, it is suggested that petitions systems perform three broad functions: providing a link between parliament and citizen; informing policy development and executive scrutiny; and, ultimately, affecting policy change. The extent to which existing petitions systems perform each of these functions varies considerably. The importance of petitioning extends beyond simply delivering requests made by individual petitioners and, regardless of the outcome of individual petitions, it is possible for a petitions system to enhance the relationship between parliament and citizen.
In the last two decades we have witnessed an increase in online petitions and campaigns emerging from Europe and North America against homophobia in various African countries, creating a particular form of visibility with some remarkable global success. Based on these online petitions and postings as well as the responses of African activists, this article reflects on the politics of this global queer solidarity. By suggesting a restrategizing of antihomophobia politics, it contributes to the ongoing debate about LGBTI politics in a transnational and global framework, pointing to the challenges but also the possibilities for the future.
Since the 1990s, internet-mediated research has been gradually gaining ground in the Social Sciences due, in part, to the expanding use of the internet by public and private organizations and individuals for numerous purposes. Among them, online petitions are often used nowadays to garner support on an issue. In several cases, they generate interesting sets of quantitative and qualitative data that can be used to address apposite research questions related to the cause of the petition and beyond. This research note negotiates selected issues of research methodology and offers examples based on this author’s experience with analysing petition data. The low cost of the wealth of information provided partly compensates for the limitations of online petitions, which more probably will be combined with other methods of scientific research. The role of researchers remains crucial. Thorough knowledge of the broader and specialist literature and familiarity with the theme of the petition are instrumental in making the best and most valid use of petition data.
The implementation of e-petition systems holds the promise to increase the participative and deliberative potential of petitions. The most ambitious e-petition systems allow for electronic submission, make publicly available the petition text, related documents and the final decision, allow supporting a petition by electronically co-signing it, and provide electronic discussion forums. Based on a comprehensive survey (2010/2011) of parliamentary petition bodies at the national level covering the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) plus Norway and Switzerland, the present state of public e-petitioning in the EU is presented, and the relevance of e-petition systems as a means of political participation is discussed.
In response to a perceived crisis of democracy, governments have trialed a variety of democratic innovations. How to measure the impact of such innovations is both difficult and hotly disputed. This article tests Smith's (2009)57.
Smith , G. 2009. Democratic innovations: Designing institutions for citizen participation, Cambridge, , England: Cambridge University Press. [CrossRef]View all references broad-based democratic goods analytical framework on what is often perceived to be a highly successful democratic innovation: Downing Street e-petitions. It accepted 33,058 petitions receiving 12,384,616 signatures. Downing Street made 3,258 official replies. Given that it is arguably the most prominent e-democratic innovation in the world to date, the lack of empirical research is very surprising—and worrying—because the perceived success has led to the wider adoption of e-petitions. This article will fulfill three principal aims: to test the veracity of the democratic goods approach for case study research, with a view to streamlining it for future work; provide the first detailed, theoretically informed analysis of Downing Street e-petitions; and make recommendations for the application of such systems more broadly.
Online activism is an integral part of the broader landscape of citizen activism in contemporary China. It assumes a variety of forms, from cultural and social activism to cyber-nationalism and online petitions and protests. Technological development and social transformation provide the basic structural conditions. A fledgling civil society of online communities and offline civic associations, the logic of social production in the internet economy, and the creativity of Chinese internet users combine to sustain online activism under conditions of growing political control of the internet in China.
The theme of the Internet and the public sphere now has a permanent place on research agendas and in intellectual inquiry; it is entering the mainstream of Political communication studies. The first part of this presentation briefly pulls together key elements in the public sphere perspective, underscoring three main analytic dimensions: the structural, the representational, and the interactional. Then the discussion addresses some central themes in the current difficulties facing democracy, refracted through the lens of the public sphere perspective. In particular, the destabilization of political communication systems is seen as a context for understanding the role of the Internet: It enters into, as well as contributes to, this destabilization. At the same time, the notion of destabilization can also embody a positive sense, pointing to dispersions of older patterns that may have outlived their utility. Further, the discussion takes up obvious positive consequences that follow from the Internet, for example that it extends and pluralizes the public sphere in a number of ways. Thereafter the focus moves on to the interactional dimension of the public sphere, specifically in regard to recent research on how deliberation proceeds in the online public sphere in the contemporary environment of political communication. Finally, the analytic category of deliberative democracy is critically examined; while useful, some of its rationalist biases, particularly in the context of extra-parliamentarian politics, limit its utility. It is suggested that the concept of civic cultures offers an alternative way to understand the significance of online political discussion.
The Internet offers a new means by which citizens may contact government to express their views or concerns, and it raises interesting empirical and theoretical questions about whether citizen contacts are affected by communication media. This article uses survey data to explore hypotheses about whether means of communication shape contacting activity. It compares Internet-based contacts with traditional contacts, showing statistically significant but for the most part substantively small differences. Effects of technology are of two kinds, those affecting only the likelihood of citizens being active in communicating with government and those affecting the frequency or intensity of communication among those who are active. The article discusses these findings in terms of transitional effects of technology, which arise from uneven distribution of the technology in society, and in terms of inherent effects, which attend to the technology itself. The most important inherent effects involve gender and political connectedness: The gender gap in contacting is larger on the Internet than in traditional forms of communication, and political connectedness has a weaker association with communication through the Internet.
Petitioning is a well established form of political participation in most liberal democracies. Yet, little is known about petitioners, their socio-demographics, motivations and assessments of petitioning processes. After the German parliament had introduced public e-petitions which are submitted, signed and discussed on the Internet in 2005, a survey of 571 traditional as well as 350 e-petitioners was carried out in 2007 as a part of a comprehensive evaluation study of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Parliament (TAB). The results indicate that both petitioner samples are characterised by an above average level of general political participation and Internet use. Users of the e-petition system are younger than traditional petitioners, but the group continues to be dominated by men and those with higher levels of formal education to the same degree as among traditional petitioners. According to our findings, the Internet-based participation channel e-petitioning seems to amplify existing inequalities in participation patterns as they predominately attract highly mobilised and politically active individuals with a disproportionately high socio-economic status. Preliminary results of an ongoing follow-up study by and large confirm this conclusion.
This study addresses 3 research questions in the context of online political discussions: What is the distribution of successful topic starting practices, what characterizes the content of large thread-starting messages, and what is the source of that content? A 6-month analysis of almost 40,000 authors in 20 political Usenet newsgroups identified authors who received a disproportionate number of replies. We labeled these authors “discussion catalysts.” Content analysis revealed that 95 percent of discussion catalysts' messages contained content imported from elsewhere on the web, about 2/3 from traditional news organizations. We conclude that the flow of information from the content creators to the readers and writers continues to be mediated by a few individuals who act as filters and amplifiers.
Electronic petitions can serve as an influential mechanism for political participation. We present a study on the dynamics in the German e-petition system which was introduced in late 2008. Drawing on a data set of signatures, we analyze four aspects: (a) the types of petitions found, (b) the temporal dynamics of petitions, (c) the types of users found, and (d) the intersection of different petitions' supporter populations. We present evidence that (a) the system is dominated by a very small number of high-volume petitions and (b) these high-volume petitions have a delayed boosting effect on the base activity in the petition system. We furthermore (c) present a typology of users, showing that although highly active “new lobbyists” and “hit-and-run activists” exist, one- or two-time petitioners have the largest impact. Finally, it is indicated that (d) many of the high-volume petitions share a significant part of their user base, hinting at a complex, topically motivated network of supporters. Through the application of methods from what has been called “Computational Social Sciences,” we illuminate a highly relevant field of political behavior online, while demonstrating the capability of data-driven approaches in such novel domains.
Twitter is a microblogging website where users read and write millions of short messages on a variety of topics every day. This study uses the context of the German federal election to investigate whether Twitter is used as a forum for political deliberation and whether online messages on Twitter validly mirror offline political sentiment. Using LIWC text analysis software, we conducted a contentanalysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician. Our results show that Twitter is indeed used extensively for political deliberation. We find that the mere number of messages mentioning a party reflects the election result. Moreover, joint mentions of two parties are in line with real world political ties and coalitions. An analysis of the tweets' political sentiment demonstrates close correspondence to the parties' and politicians' political positions indicating that the content of Twitter messages plausibly reflects the offline political landscape. We discuss the use of microblogging message content as a valid indicator of political sentiment and derive suggestions for further research. Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
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