This book focuses on online petitioning and crowdfunding platforms to demonstrate the everyday impact that digital communications have had on contemporary citizen participation. In doing do, the book argues that crowdsourced participation has become normalised and institutionalised into the everyday repertoires of citizens and their organisations. Within the digitally-enabled shift in individual acts of participation, creating, signing and sharing online petitions and micro-donations have become a focal point because of the clear evolution from their offline and online counterparts.To illustrate their arguments the authors use an original nationally representative survey on acts of political engagement, undertaken with Australian citizens. Additionally, through detailed interviews and analysis of their web presence they show how advocacy organisations use online petitions within their repertoire of strategic actions. Lastly, they analyse the kinds of policy issues that mobilise citizens on crowdsourcing platforms, based on a unique dataset of 17,000 petitions from the popular non-government platform, Change.org. They contrast these mass public concerns with the policy agenda of the government of the day to show there is a disjuncture and general lack of responsiveness to this form of citizen expression. 

Ariadne Vromen is Professor of Public Administration at the Australian National University. Until mid-2020 she was Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Sydney. She has long-term research interests in political engagement, including a significant project on how young people use social media for civic engagement in Australia, the UK, and the USA.Darren Halpin is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. He has published widely on the topics of interest groups and organized interests, including recent articles inGovernance,British Journal of Political Science,Journal of European Public Policy andPublic Administration.Michael Vaughan is a post-doctoral researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Freie University Berlin, on a project on Digitalisation and the Transnational Public Sphere. 

Chapter 1: Why do online crowds matter for contemporary citizen politics?.- Chapter 2: Who signs and shares petitions and donates money online?.- Chapter 3: How do political organisations use online petitioning and crowdfunding?.- Chapter 4: What kinds of issues do citizens successfully raise via online petitions?.- Chapter 5: Why do personal narratives and stories matter for online political engagement?.- Chapter 6: Does online citizen engagement matter for reinvigorating contemporary politics?