Slacktivism

Boris Ginzburg

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Many countries have introduced e-government petitioning systems, in which a petition that gathers enough signatures triggers some political outcome. This paper models citizens who choose whether to sign a petition. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the petition's chance of bringing change. The number of citizens approaches infinity, while the cost of signing is positive but low, falling within certain bounds. In the limit, participation is increasing in the required quota of signatures. Social welfare is decreasing in the quota. Information aggregation may fail if individual signals are sufficiently uninformative.

Keywords: online petitions; collective action; voting; political participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/94606/1/Slacktivism.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/116227/1/MPRA_paper_116227.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Slacktivism (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:94606

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