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.

Elaborates on how advocacy organizations use online petitions within their repertoire of strategic actions Highlights how donating and signing a petition are the two acts of engagement most likely to be engaged Shows that petition campaigns aimed at corporations are more likely to be successful

Autorentext

Ariadne Vromen is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include: political participation, social movements, advocacy organisations, digital politics, and young people and politics. She has completed extensive research on young people's political engagement, including a comparative project on social media use in Australia, the UK and USA. She has also co-authored several texts on Australian politics, including Powerscape: Contemporary Australian Politics (2009).

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Why do online crowds matter for contemporary citizen politics?.- Chapter 2: Who signs and shares petitions and donates money online?.- Chapter 3: How do political organisations use online petitioning and crowdfunding?.- Chapter 4: What kinds of issues do citizens successfully raise via online petitions?.- Chapter 5: Why do personal narratives and stories matter for online political engagement?.- Chapter 6: Does online citizen engagement matter for reinvigorating contemporary politics?