Gender and Political Mobilization Online: Participation and Policy Success on a Global Petitioning Platform

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.

Keywords: gender representation, political participation, online petitions, descriptive representation and substantive representation, descriptive success and substantive success