Political Organisation Meets Political Organising: The Use of Digital Crowd Sourced Participation Strategies by Political Organizations

Online petition sites and crowd-funding platforms are now common place. While not all their content is explicitly political, they offer citizens the capacity to to pursue issue agendas that they see as important, and to do so without working through existing political organisations. In sum, they are generally assumed to offer unmediated ways for citizen engagement in political life. In that sense, they may also be viewed as reflecting a shift from political organisation to political organising. Yet, some work also suggests that existing political organisations also use these platforms to assist them in their political work. And, moreover, that some organisations go as far as to replicate these functions through developing their own in-house or branded platforms. We ask: To what extent are digital platforms for citizen engagement – such as petitioning and donating – being incorporated into the organisational repertoire of standing political organisations? In this paper we examine, taking the case of Australia, the extent to which existing advocacy groups and think tanks utilise these platforms to assist them in their political purposes. We do so by combining website analysis, content analysis of Facebook and Twitter feeds, and interviews with a broad cross-section of Australian political organisations.