Big Data and Collective Action

As more collective action takes place on Internet-based platforms, it will leave digital imprints that can be captured in ‘big data’ sets that could offer social science researchers the potential for new forms of analysis. This chapter uses a big data approach to study the dynamics of online petitions, focusing on the case of the UK Government. A large data set is harvested to analyze the rate at which petitions tend to grow in signatures, and test a specific hypothesis about whether the rate of growth has a sharper peak than would be expected from a more normal distribution. The work underscores the failure of many petitions, but also shows how rapidly successful petitions reach a tipping point. Such findings could have implications for the strategies of those initiating petitions and those designing web sites with the aim of maximising citizen engagement with policy issues.