There's no denying we've seen a massive proliferation of online petitions, but are they actually effective in influencing policy? What forms of participatory democracy are actually effective as a citizen engagement mechanism that can influence policy.
Hi Jason,
I think this can help :Preprint Online Petitioning Through Data Exploration and What We Foun...
Internet users will continue to increase, social media becomes a means of communicating to individuals, certain groups, or state, because the government has also opened itself to provide various facilities so that people can communicate directly with the government online (audio, audio visual, text), many research results reveal how the power of social media is used as a means of mass communication that influences policy formulation, and can even affect the government system.
Arab Spring is an ideal example to see the role of social media influencing the government system, then various openPetition sites, Avaaz, change.org, Campact, MoveOn.org are some online petition sites that can be used by the public to influence certain policies in a country, even as they apply In general, the global community can participate, I imagine that in the future the public policy formulation system, input (support and rejection) will be more complex, the source of public policy input does not only come from one source, there will be various online sources that can be used as sources of influence policy making, one of which is an online petition.
but there is a record that online petitions do not always represent the voice of the people in the real world, considering that in a virtual world one person can become 2 or 3 or more to become someone else (fake account).
Hi,
I think this question about online petitions and other citizen engagement mechanisms should be put in perspective. The effectiveness of a chosen mechanism will depend on the issue (matter), its importance, level of citizens' awareness and their interest, and of course, the targeted groups. It is true that social media is revolutionizing the world but not all the stakeholders in a certain issue can be reached through online or social media especially, in the developing countries.