Agenda Setting of Petition Politics: The Case of Change.org

Following the success of online campaigning organizations that mobilize mass publics, such as MoveOn, GetUp, 38 Degrees and Avaaz; new online portals, such as Change.org, have emerged that enable citizens to start their own political campaigns. Change.org now has over 60 million active users in 196 countries, with purportedly approximately 12 successful petitions each day, and one third of all users have signed on to a winning campaign. Change.org has quickly become the leading citizen e-petition site in Australia, particularly due to the absence of government-hosted petition portals similar to Downing St Petitions (UK), Petitionen Bundestag (Germany) and We the People (USA). As Change.Org is instead a commercial platform, campaigns are distinctive in that they are not limited to targeting only government or prioritizing a narrow definition of national political and policy impact. Indeed, many campaigns started on Change.Org may not be understood as political at all, as they can focus on a range of targets and more localized issues. We used the publicly available API to capture data on approximately 17,000 petition campaigns started in Australia since Change.Org launched in 2012. Using the Comparative Policy Agendas project codebook we coded the agenda topic and target of these campaigns to match whether they were responsive to, or act as agenda setters for, contemporaneous political debate found in both the media and the national legislature. We found that there is an increasing divide between the agendas of online citizen politics and parliamentary politics, and discuss the implications of this for representative democracy.