Petition growth and success rates on the UK No. 10 Downing Street Website

Now that so much of collective action takes place online, web-generated data can further understanding of the mechan-ics of Internet-based mobilisation. This trace data offers so-cial science researchers the potential for new forms of analy-sis, using real-time transactional data based on entire popula-tions, rather than sample-based surveys of what people think they did or might do. This paper uses a ‘big data ’ approach to track the growth of over 8,000 petitions to the UK Gov-ernment on the No. 10 Downing Street website for two years, analysing the rate of growth per day and testing the hypoth-esis that the distribution of daily change will be leptokurtic (rather than normal) as previous research on agenda setting would suggest. This hypothesis is confirmed, suggesting that Internet-based mobilisation is characterized by tipping points (or punctuated equilibria) and explaining some of the volatil-ity in online collective action. We find also that most suc-cessful petitions grow quickly and that the number of signa-tures a petition receives on its first day is a significant factor in explaining the overall number of signatures a petition re-ceives during its lifetime. These findings have implications for the strategies of those initiating petitions and the design of web sites with the aim of maximising citizen engagement with policy issues. Author Keywords petition; mobilization; trace data; big data; leptokurtic