Social information is particularly prominent in digital settings where the design of platforms can more easily give real-time information about the behaviour of peers and reference groups and thereby stimulate political activity. Changes to these pla
tforms can generate natural experiments allowing an assessment of the impact of changes in social information and design on participation. This paper investigates the impact of the introduction of trending information on the homepage of the UK government petitions platform. Using interrupted time series and a regression discontinuity design, we find that the introduction of the trending feature had no statistically significant effect on the overall number of signatures per day, but that the distribution of signatures across petitions changes: the most popular petitions gain even more signatures at the expense of those with less signatories. We find significant differences between petitions trending at different ranks, even after controlling for each petitions individual growth prior to trending. The findings suggest a non-negligible group of individuals visit the homepage of the site looking for petitions to sign and therefore see the list of trending petitions, and a significant proportion of this group responds to the social information that it provides. These findings contribute to our understanding of how social information, and the form in which it is presented, affects individual political behaviour in digital settings.
The Internet has been ascribed a prominent role in collective action, particularly with widespread use of social media. But most mobilisations fail. We investigate the characteristics of those few mobilisations that succeed and hypothesise that the p
resence of starters with low thresholds for joining will determine whether a mobilisation achieves success, as suggested by threshold models. We use experimental data from public good games to identify personality types associated with willingness to start in collective action. We find a significant association between both extraversion and internal locus of control, and willingness to start, while agreeableness is associated with a tendency to follow. Rounds without at least a minimum level of extraversion among the participants are unlikely to be funded, providing some support for the hypothesis.
