Crowdsourced Politics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Why Do Online Crowds Matter for Contemporary Citizen Engagement in Public Policy and Politics?

   • Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan

   Pages 1-21

3. Who Signs and Shares Petitions and Donates Money Online?

   • Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan

   Pages 23-47

4. How Do Political Organisations Use Online Petitioning and Crowdfunding?

   • Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan

   Pages 49-72

5. What Kinds of Issues Do Citizens Successfully Raise via Online Petitions?

   • Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan

   Pages 73-94

6. Why Do Personal Narratives and Stories Matter for Online Political Engagement?

   • Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan

   Pages 95-115

7. Does Online Citizen Engagement Matter for Reinvigorating Contemporary Politics?

   • Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan

   Pages 117-132

8. Back Matter

   Pages 133-143

   PDF

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. 

• Online citizen engagement and politics
• Online political engagement
• Narratives and Online Political Engagement
• Stories and Online Political Engagement
• Online Petitions
• Online Petitioning and Politics
• Online Crowdfunding and Politics
• Online crowd and citizen politics

“Crowdsourced Politics provides a clear-eyed, accessible, and very needed analysis of one of the most important civic and political phenomenons of the twenty-first century: crowd-based online mobilization. We’ve all seen it but few can understand it or help us make sense of it in the way this book does.” (—Hahrie Han, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, Director of the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University)

“The crowdsourcing of politics - whether it be e-petitions or micro-donations - has become a key area of action, contestation, and debate, impacting how politics and civic life operates. Discussions veer from outright hype to dystopian doom, indifference and disdain. Written by leading scholars in the field, this book cuts through unhelpful dichotomies by analysing what is happening, how and to what effect.”(-Scott Wright, Professor of Political Communication and Journalism, Faculty of Media & Communication, Bournemouth University)

• Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

  Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin

• Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  Michael Vaughan

Ariadne Vromen is Professor of Public Administration at the Australian National University. Until mid-2020 she was Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Sydney. She has long-term research interests in political engagement, including a significant project on how young people use social media for civic engagement in Australia, the UK, and the USA.

Darren Halpin is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. He has published widely on the topics of interest groups and organized interests, including recent articles in Governance, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of European Public Policy and Public Administration.


Michael Vaughan is a post-doctoral researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Freie University Berlin, on a project on Digitalisation and the Transnational Public Sphere.