Abstract
As political life moves online, it is important to know whether online political participation excludes certain groups. Using a dataset of 3.9 million signers of online petitions in 132 countries, we examine the descriptive success (number of successful petitions) and substantive success (topic of successful petitions) of women and men. Women’s participation is higher than expected in the ‘thin’ action of petition signing, but consistently lower in the ‘thick’ action of petition creation. We do not find a link between lower female thick participation and female descriptive success. In terms of substantive success, we find successful petitions reflect female users’ priorities more closely than men’s, independent of the petition initiator’s gender. These results hold both platform-wide and within most countries in the dataset. We show that these results occur due to the low level of petition success (1.2%) on the platform, which increases the importance of thin forms of participation.
Highlights
The Internet has opened up new forms of political participation
Women are underrepresented in thicker forms of political participation such as running for office (Costantini 1990), donating money for political advocacy (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995), or taking part in deliberations (Karpowitz, Mendelberg, and Shaker 2012; Wolak 2014)
Our results show online petition signing reproduces the pattern of thin/thick participation seen in representative democracy
Summary
The Internet has opened up new forms of political participation. One of the most common is online petitioning. We set out how we conceptualize different forms of group participation and success across different modes of politics. We compare these concepts in terms of electoral politics and petitioning, but the categories we define can be applied to many modes of politics. In the case of participation, the analogy between electoral politics and petitioning is relatively straightforward. In the case of petitions, we distinguish between signing petitions (thin) and creating petitions (thick). In both cases, the thick participation determines the choice set (candidates or petitions, respectively) for thin participation. In the case of petitions, we are interested in whether there is a gender divide in either of these forms of participation
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