Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action

Abstract

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 presence 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. Background: online collective action and leadershipThe third millennium has begun with many prominent examples of collective action worldwide, from the uprisings against dictatorships in the so-called 'Arab spring' of 2011, to widespread mobilisation against liberal democratic governments in the aftermath of the financial crash and crisis of 2008.Widespread use of the internet, with its capacity to reduce the costs of participation, dissemination and organisation, has often been cited as a contributing factor.Use of the internet seems to be related to political activism even when controlling for prior social or attitudinal characteristics of Internet users such as age, education and civic duty (Norris, 2009, p. 135) and interest in politics (Borge and Cardenal, 2009).A growing number of scholars argue that the availability of Internet-based platforms challenges long-standing conventional wisdom about the limits and barriers to mass political participation (Lupia and Sin, 2003;Bimber et al., 2006Bimber et al., , 2008Bimber et al., , 2012;;Bennett and Segerberg, 2012, 2013), particularly through the facilitation of huge online gatherings of people who do not know each other, and who have carried out small participatory actions, such as signing an e-petition or raising the profile of a demonstration through endorsement or notification on a social media site.The low cost of these acts would mean that they appear low down on any 'ladder' or scale of political participation (Arnstein, 1969;Almond and Verba, 1961;Parry et al, 1992), but they clearly fall within the category of collective action geared at the securing of public goods.And some large-scale mobilisations of these 'micro-donations' of resources have brought new political issues to public attention and even achieved the ultimate goal of policy change.For example, in the UK a handful of petitions submitted to the No 10 Downing Street e-petitions site obtained over a million signatures, 1 one of which was officially recognised as playing a part in reversing the government's policy plans to introduce road pricing.Even in this golden age for collective action, however, most attempts to mobilise collective action around public goods fail, while only a few succeed.For every successful demonstration, petition, or sustained collective action for policy change, there are many more campaigns for similar issues that have barely left the ground, never obtaining critical mass or success by any criteria.The collection of transactional data from 8,000 electronic petitions to the UK government (shown in Figure 1 below) shows that 95 per cent fail to attain even the 500 signatures necessary for an official response, a modest criterion for success.Use of the Internet for collective action increases the ratio of unsuccessful to successful collective initiatives.Low

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