Slacktivism
| Author | Boris Ginzburg |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09516298231162039 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Slacktivism
Boris Ginzburg
Department of Economics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid,
Getafe (Madrid), Spain
Abstract
Many countries have introduced e-government petitioning systems, in which a petition that gathers
a certain quota of signatures triggers some political outcome. This paper models citizens who
choose whether to sign such a petition. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the petition’s
chance of bringing change. The number of citizens is large, while the cost of signing is positive
but low. I show that a petition that can bring change succeeds by a strictly positive margin.
Hence, a citizen signing the petition is almost surely not pivotal. On the other hand, a petition
that cannot bring change still gathers the required number of signatures when citizens are not
very well informed, implying a failure of information aggregation.
Keywords
collective action; online petitions; political participation; threshold public goods; voting
JEL codes
D72; D83; H41.
1. Introduction
Online petitions have become a part of the political process in many democracies. Two
features of this form of political participation stand out. First, the number of potential par-
ticipants is very large, essentially including the entire electorate. Second, while there is a
cost of participation –the time and effort required to sign an online petition –that cost is
usually negligible. Because of the very low cost, political action through online petitions
is sometimes referred to, derisively, as slacktivism.
Corresponding author:
Department of Economics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Calle Madrid 126, 28903 Getafe (Madrid), Spain.
Email: boris.ginzburg@uc3m.es
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2023, Vol. 35(2) 126–143
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09516298231162039
journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp
This paper studies participation in this form of political action, under one particular
assumption. Specifically, the paper considers settings in which the outcome of the peti-
tion depends on whether the number of signatures reaches an exogenous quota.
There are several reasons why exogenous thresholds are relevant to online petitions.
First, while a petition can signal the preferences of the public to policymakers, they
are far more likely to receive the signal if the petition is sufficiently widely reported.
Not all petitions become newsworthy, and it is reasonable to think that only petitions
that attract sufficiently many signatures are reported in the media. Even if all petitions
are reported, media reports usually contain coarse information about the number of citi-
zens who sign a petition –for example, a headline may report that a certain petition has
gathered ‘more than a million signatures’, without giving the exact number. For these
reasons, the signalling value of a petition makes a jump when a certain exogenous
number of signatures is reached.
Second, petitions do not only serve as a means of signalling public opinion to policy-
makers. Instead, in a number of countries, legislatures or governments have committed to
act on a petition if it attracts sufficiently many signatures. In these e-government petition-
ing systems, a petition signed by a certain number of citizens will be debated in the legis-
lature or will trigger some other official response.
1
Although the legislature can still vote
to reject the petition, the probability of political change jumps from zero to a positive
value if the required number of signatures is reached.
To analyse such settings, the paper adapts the model of threshold public good games to
the context of online petitions. A large number of citizens are choosing whether to sign a
petition, at some cost. If the petition collects a certain number of signatures, it will be con-
sidered by the legislature. Citizens are uncertain about the preferences of members of the
legislature. These preferences are represented by a state of the world: in state 0 the legis-
lature will reject the petition, and in the complementary state 1 it will approve it. All citi-
zens receive an imperfect continuous signal about the state. If the petition is approved, it
gives each citizen a positive payoff. Hence, citizens have imperfect information about the
petition’s chance of success, but are fully informed about its value if it succeeds. Citizens’
choice is thus driven by the tradeoff between the cost of signing the petition and the
benefit of increasing its chance of success.
A crucial feature of the model is that the cost of signing the petition is positive but low.
This reflects the nature of online activism, in which the cost of participation –the effort
required to open, read, and sign the petition –exists, but is negligible. Specifically, the
paper analyses sequences of equilibria when the number of citizens goes to infinity,
while the cost of signing falls within certain bounds. In the limit, both the upper and
the lower bound converge to zero, but at every point along the sequence there is a realistic
interval of small but positive costs that satisfy the bounds. As a consequence, the usual
‘paradox of not voting’(Downs, 1957) does not emerge: as the size of the electorate
approaches infinity, participation in the limit is not universal but is also distinct from zero.
The first result of the paper is that in the limit, aside from a special case, the petition
either succeeds or fails by a margin that is strictly positive, both in absolute terms and in
relation to the number of citizens. Thus, in the limit, a citizen who signs the petition is
almost surely not pivotal, even though along the sequence the probability of being
pivotal remains positive. In particular, at a stable equilibrium, in state 1 the petition
Ginzburg 127
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