The sociodynamics of online political behaviour: the case of lapetition.be

Jonathan Bright, Scott Hale, Helen Margetts (OII)

Jean-Benoit Pilet, Laura Sudulich, Sandra Bermudez (ULB)

Voluntary Participation in Civic Tech

• Voluntary participation• Network good -> more

participation = better• Collective outcome of

some benefit to community itself

Nielsen: “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of

users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.”

Voluntary Participation in Civic Tech

Problem?

• Site relies on a relatively small amount of people -> vulnerability

• Harder to claim outcomes are “representative” -> important for petition sites etc.

• Hence: need to know more about why one off users or lurkers become regular users of a site

Large French language petitions website

Data 2006-2015~2 million petition signers, ~8,000 creators

Anonymised

Number of petitions signed

Question

• What turns a one off user into a regular user?• Two hypotheses:– Inherent characteristics of user– Experience with the website / activity

User characteristics

• Desire to participate may be inherent, or motivated by factors beyond website’s control

• Huge variety of potential factors: demographics, personality, life experience

• Can be expressed through the idea of a “threshold” (Granovetter) – Some people like joining in more than others

• H1: regular users will typically also be ones who sign smaller / minority petitions

• H2: petition creators (starters) are more likely to sign other petitions

Experience with site

• However website experience may also play a role– How effective was the petition?

• H3 Signing a successful petition will make you more likely to sign another

• H4 Creating a successful petition will make you more likely to sign another

User characteristics

Good evidence that petition creators sign more

Some evidence that very regular signers also have lower thresholds

Site experience

Weak positive relationship between first interaction and subsequent revisiting (do signers know about subsequent success)

Conclusions & Next steps

• Some evidence that both inherent characteristics of users and site experience make a difference in terms of explaining participation

• But lots left to explain -> further work on demographics, survey instruments, characteristics of website itself