Does crowdsourced online political engagement matter for reinvigorating post-pandemic politics?

Crowdsourced participation via petitioning and crowdfunding platforms is a unique type of highly mediated, citizen engagement in democratic and political life. We theorise the potential, or otherwise, of crowdsourced participation in addressing the well documented malaise in contemporary liberal democracies. To evaluate the distinctiveness of a crowdsourced logic we contrast crowdsourced and institutionalised forms of political engagement along four levels: micro individual; meso organisational; macro governance; and meta ideational. Based on analysis of original survey data, scraped platform data, and interviews, we show that the interplay across these four levels of engagement presents opportunities for political change, while challenging governing institutions to adapt to crowdsourced engagement by citizens and organised advocates Yet while our analysis is a relatively optimistic one of agile, mass-based citizen engagement, we also reflect on the growing dark and anti-democratic side of citizen mobilisation and information sharing that corporate social media platforms foster and rarely choose to regulate or dampen. In particular, we focus on how fringe anti-vaccination groups have been able to successfully amplify their cause during the COVID-19 pandemic by using crowdsourced participation via petitioning and crowdfunding platforms.