Table Of ContentCrowdsourced Politics
The Rise of Online
Petitions &
Micro-Donations
Ariadne Vromen
Darren Halpin
Michael Vaughan
Crowdsourced Politics
· ·
Ariadne Vromen Darren Halpin
Michael Vaughan
Crowdsourced Politics
The Rise of Online Petitions & Micro-Donations
Ariadne Vromen Darren Halpin
Australian National University Australian National University
Canberra, ACT, Australia Canberra, ACT, Australia
Michael Vaughan
Freie Universität Berlin
Berlin, Germany
ISBN 978-981-19-4356-0 ISBN 978-981-19-4357-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4357-7
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Acknowledgements
Finishing a book is often a story of ongoing interaction with crowds
of people and ideas. We started this research project in mid-2016 and
the political world has changed significantly since that time. During the
life of this project we also all changed jobs or positions, and have been
juggling many competing commitments and expectations. We maintained
our enthusiasm for this project all along, despite that the global pandemic
meant that the three of us haven’t met in-person since early 2020.
All of the chapters in this book have been presented at conferences
across the world and in Australia, and we thank everyone who has inter-
acted with our ideas for their questions and encouragement. We gratefully
acknowledge the support of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked
Society in Berlin, and our collaboration with Pablo Porten Cheé, Martin
Emmer and Marlene Kunst. The ideas and analyses in this project received
helpful feedback from a generous network of scholars, including Scott
Wright, Hahrie Han, Jasmin Fitzpatrick, James Dennis, Lance Bennett,
Dave Karpf, Francesco Bailo, Max Groemping, Ferran Martinez Coma,
Selen Ercan, Anika Gauja and Filippo Trevisan.
We also acknowledge research assistance from a team of coders at
the University of Sydney, and Mahin Raissi at ANU for helping to develop
the petitions dataset. This project was funded by the Australian Research
Council as a Discovery Project, and supported by the University of
Sydney and the Australian National University.
v
Contents
1 Why Do Online Crowds Matter for Contemporary
Citizen Engagement in Public Policy and Politics? 1
New Modes of Participation 5
Participation Is Digital 8
Crowdsourcing Connected Citizens and Ideas 11
Data Sources 14
Chapter Outline 16
References 19
2 Who Signs and Shares Petitions and Donates Money
Online? 23
Contemporary Political Engagement Is Digital 24
Why Do People Sign Petitions? A Normalised Form
of Engagement 29
Who Signs and Shares Petitions? 32
What Are Micro Donations, Their Emergence and Who
Donates? 35
Petition Signing Patterns on Change.org 42
Conclusion: Who Signs and Shares Petitions and Donates
Money Online? 45
References 46
vii
viii CONTENTS
3 How Do Political Organisations Use Online
Petitioning and Crowdfunding? 49
The Emergence and Consolidation of Crowdsourced
Participation Online Platforms: From Parliaments to People 50
Crowdsourcing by Established Political Organisations 55
An Online Platform Perspective: Organisational Traces
in Change.org Petitions? 60
Conclusion: Implications of the Use of Crowdsourced Politics
for Organisations 67
References 70
4 What Kinds of Issues Do Citizens Successfully Raise
via Online Petitions? 73
The Issue Agendas of Petition Campaigns 74
Evaluating Successful Campaigns 81
Multi-dimensional Mediation of Petition Success: Sign-ons,
Social Media Sharing and Media Attention 85
Conclusion: Importance of Issues and Success to Petition
Campaigns 91
References 93
5 Why Do Personal Narratives and Stories Matter
for Online Political Engagement? 95
Storytelling and Crowdsourced Politics 96
Storytelling to the Digital Crowd 98
Storytelling about the Digital Crowd 102
Comparing Storytelling on Change.org and Pozible 106
Conclusion: Importance of Storytelling to Digital
Crowdsourced Politics 113
References 114
6 Does Online Citizen Engagement Matter
for Reinvigorating Contemporary Politics? 117
Contemporary Citizen Participation 118
Theorising the Challenge from Crowdsourced Politics 121
References 131
References 133
Index 141
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Types of political engagement 27
Fig. 2.2 Attitudes towards petitions (of those who have signed
and those who have not) 28
Fig. 2.3 Platform for signing online petitions 30
Fig. 2.4 Indicators of petition success, to signers 31
Fig. 2.5 Petition signers on efficacy of petitions 32
Fig. 2.6 Who signs petitions? 33
Fig. 2.7 Perceptions of petition signing and sharing 34
Fig. 2.8 Donating money to a political organisation 41
Fig. 2.9 Donating money to a cause 42
Fig. 3.1 Options for ‘joining’ interest groups 57
Fig. 4.1 Topic of petitions by target 80
Fig. 4.2 Difference in proportion of petitions’ policy topics vs
national legislation, 2012–2017 84
Fig. 4.3 Facebook shares and signature counts, by topic 87
Fig. 4.4 Media reporting on petition targets 90
Fig. 5.1 Storytelling in petition and crowdfunding texts 108
Fig. 5.2 Correlations in Pozible crowdfunding campaigns 109
Fig. 5.3 Correlations in Change.org petitions 109
Fig. 5.4 Word cloud of 50 most named people in petitions 112
Fig. 5.5 Word cloud of 50 most named people in crowdfunding
campaigns 112
ix
List of Tables
Table 1.1 Contrasting forms of political crowds 14
Table 1.2 Contrasting forms of politics on four levels of analysis 15
Table 2.1 Old to new fundraising skills 37
Table 2.2 Petition signing activity by breadth of topics 45
Table 3.1 Australian parliaments’ adoption of online petitions 52
Table 3.2 Interest group websites functionality 59
Table 3.3 Conceptualising organisational ‘traces’ in petition
platforms 60
Table 3.4 Organisationally created Change.org petitions, by type 62
Table 3.5 Political organisations with highest mention counts 64
Table 4.1 Frequency of petitions, by policy topic and declared
victory 79
Table 6.1 The challenge from crowdsourced politics 122
xi
CHAPTER 1
Why Do Online Crowds Matter
for Contemporary Citizen Engagement
in Public Policy and Politics?
Abstract This introductory chapter raises the core concerns of the book
that is premised on three key arguments: First, crowd-based online mobil-
isation matters for political engagement. Second, there has been extensive
digital innovation that has fostered the rise of new platform organisations,
but traditional advocacy and political organisations, including parliaments
and the bureaucracy, have been slower to harness this change. Third, these
developments are core to this democratic moment as they have facilitated
new, ad hoc active publics that share personal stories and attempt to shape
policy agendas.
Keywords Citizen engagement · Digital politics · Crowdsourcing ·
Democracy · Participation · Online platforms
Crowdsourced politics emerges as a response to both everyday and
extraordinary, local and international, events. It is underpinned by the
logic of mobilising large numbers of citizens quickly, but at the same time
seeks to change dominant stories, and create institutional responses and
political change.
In March 2019 a terrorist shot and killed 51 people in two mosques in
the city of Christchurch in New Zealand. He shared the carnage in real
time using Facebook Live, while Facebook rapidly tried to take down
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
A. Vromen et al., Crowdsourced Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4357-7_1
