Slacktivism

Boris Ginzburg

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2023, vol. 35, issue 2, 126-143

Abstract: Many countries have introduced e-government petitioning systems, in which a petition that gathers a certain quota of signatures triggers some political outcome. This paper models citizens who choose whether to sign such a petition. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the petition’s chance of bringing change. The number of citizens is large, while the cost of signing is positive but low. I show that a petition that can bring change succeeds by a strictly positive margin. Hence, a citizen signing the petition is almost surely not pivotal. On the other hand, a petition that cannot bring change still gathers the required number of signatures when citizens are not very well informed, implying a failure of information aggregation.

Keywords: collective action; online petitions; political participation; threshold public goods; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Slacktivism (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:35:y:2023:i:2:p:126-143

DOI: 10.1177/09516298231162039

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