Feature
In Denver, a Model for Jail-Based Voting
Across the United States, hundreds of thousands of people in jail retain their right to vote while being held in pretrial detention, having not been convicted of a crime.
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
What is Kamala Harris’s Story and Why Does it Matter So Much?
“In public life, if you don’t claim authorship of your own story, others will claim it for you.”
Q+A
Exiled Venezuelan opposition leader on the election, the protests, and the future of the country
HKS research fellow Freddy Guevara MC/MPA 2024 remains optimistic about a democratic transition and that the July election was the beginning of the end for the Maduro regime.