Commentary
The Global Impact of the United States Election
No matter where you are in the world, the effects of November 5, 2024, are enormous, and its global ramifications will be seen very soon, for better or for worse.
Occasional Paper
Gender and Political Mobilization Online: Participation and Policy Success on a Global Petitioning Platform
Issues
As political life moves online, it is important to know whether online political participation excludes certain groups. Using a dataset of 3.9 million signers of online petitions in 132 countries, this paper examines the descriptive success (number of successful petitions) and substantive success (topic of successful petitions) of women and men. Women’s participation is higher than expected in the ‘thin’ action of petition signing, but consistently lower in the ‘thick’ action of petition creation. This paper does not find a link between lower female thick participation and female descriptive success. In terms of substantive success, the paper finds successful petitions reflect female users’ priorities more closely than men’s, independent of the petition initiator’s gender. These results hold both platform-wide and within most countries in the dataset. This paper shows that these results occur due to the low level of petition success (1.2%) on the platform, which increases the importance of thin forms of participation.
Commentary
Election 2024: Appreciating The Front-Line Workers of Democracy
As the dust settles from the U.S. presidential election, the American public can celebrate that the election process was largely nonviolent and smooth. However, it is important that the public not be lulled into thinking this signals the end of election administrators’ problems.
Commentary
The Electoral College and Our Broken Presidential Election System
Roughly 80 percent of the population who do not live in “swing states” lack a clear notion of what they “need to do” to actively support their candidates.