A FIELD-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF EMERGENT MOBILIZATION

IN ONLINE COLLECTIVE ACTION∗

Gabriela Gonzalez Vaillant, Juhi Tyagi, Idil Afife Akin, Fernanda Page Poma,
Michael Schwartz, and Arnout van de Rijt†

We ask why most online signature campaigns attract only a handful of supporters while a few
are backed by millions. Using a field-experimental design on the popular petitioning website
Change.org, we investigate the role of emergent phenomena during the mobilization process in
determining levels of collective action. We demonstrate the significance of these emergent pro-
cesses while controlling the structural profiles, organizing strategies, and initial signatory
volumes of online petition campaigns. Differences in ultimate signatory support among similar
petitions are as extreme as theories of critical mass and tipping points would suggest, yet the
dynamics leading up to these arbitrary disparities are unexpected. Growth is highly erratic,
with initially unpopular campaigns experiencing wholly unexpected revivals, limiting the
predictability of future from past momentum to just the short run. The mechanism we identify
driving these unpredictable dynamics we call “accidental activation,” the unanticipated recruit-
ment of secondary mobilizers.

Why do the vast majority of campaigns and movements mobilize only a handful of supporters
while a special few recruit thousands or even millions of people? What distinguishes the few
movements that gain momentum from the many that perish prematurely? This question has
long been central to social movement theory.
Focusing on online petition signing, this article seeks to extend the existing repertoire of
explanations for social movement growth that focus on factors that are fixed prior to the actual
mobilization process. Such a priori factors include conducive political opportunity structures
(Schwartz 1976; Tilly 1978; McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1989; Meyer 2004), framing that reson-
ates with existing ideological beliefs in the target population (Snow and Bedford 1988; Fisher
1993; Somers and Block 2005), and structural ties to elites with social change resources
(McCarthy and Zald 1973; Jenkins and Perrow 1997). Instead of focusing on these a priori
factors, our research investigates the impact of mechanisms that activate after the initiation of
campaigns and that may affect their development in unanticipated or unpredictable ways.
To demonstrate that these emergent forces are endogenous to the process of mobilization,
and are not a delayed expression of structural preconditions, we employ a novel field-
experimental method that combines the causal inference potential of laboratory experiments
with the realism of naturalistic observation. Through randomization and the construction of
similar petitions in real-world environments, we are able to control for the structural, cultural,
_______________________________
∗
We thank Michael Claffey and Michael Restivo for technical assistance and the Change.org team for providing us
with valuable information on their organization and operations. This research was supported by National Science
Foundation Grant SES-1340122 (to Van de Rijt).
†
Gabriela Gonzalez Vaillant, Juhi Tyagi, Idil Afife Akin and Fernanda Page Poma are graduate students in the
Department of Sociology at Stony Brook University. Michael Schwartz is Distinguished Teaching Professor of
Sociology at Stony Brook University. Arnout van de Rijt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and
the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. Please direct correspondence to:
Arnout van de Rijt, SUNY Stony Brook, 100 Nicolls Road, Department of Sociology, SBS S423, arnout.vanderijt@
stonybrook.edu, tel: +1 (631) 632-7704.

© 2015 Mobilization: An International Quarterly 21(3): 281-303

DOI 10.17813/1086-671X-20-3-281
282 Mobilization

and movement-planning variables that are the focal point of most explanatory models of social
movements. Therefore, we can causally attribute the variance in the outcomes we observe to
emergent differentiation across multiple real-time mobilization processes.
Our results suggest an important role for emergent factors in determining the course of a
movement. However, these emergent factors take on a distinct character from the critical mass
dynamic theorized in the collective action literature (Granovetter 1978; Oliver, Marwell, and
Teixeira 1985; Müller and Opp 1986; Macy 1991; Heckathorn 1996; Kim and Bearman 1997)
or studies of social contagion (Rogers 1962; Hedström 1994; Strang and Soule 1998; Centola
and Macy 2007; Van de Rijt, Kang, Restivo, and Patil 2014). Rather than the fate of a cam-
paign being decided by mobilization passing an initial threshold of support, the temporal
evolution we observe follows an erratic pinball-like pattern; unplanned or unpredictable events
such as the sudden engagement of well-positioned activists awaken near-dormant campaigns.
We call the mechanism driving these unpredictable dynamics accidental activation: the
unanticipated recruitment of secondary mobilizers.
We conducted our research at the online petition site Change.org. We do not argue that
the dynamics of online protest can be equated with other forms of protest outside the virtual
sphere, for a host of well-supported reasons. Among the most relevant is the extremely low
cost (in time and risk) of online petition signing, compared to on-the-ground mobilization
(Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010; Earl and Kimport 2011). Another is the relative absence of
commitment to further participation, as compared to the intensive interaction that face-to-face
participation usually involves (Lewis, Gray, and Meierhenrich 2014). Still another is the
minimal effort required from online activists, who can recruit support and transmit masses of
information with a few keystrokes (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl 2005; Margetts, John, Escher,
and Reissfelder 2011). These dramatic differences, which clearly impact the ongoing organ-
izing process, imply that the emergent phenomena we document can only be comfortably
generalized to online petitions and similar mobilizations in virtual space. Nevertheless, we
have larger ambitions for our results: since we identify particular endogenous dynamics that
can also be found in on-the-ground organizing, we believe our results merit attention as pos-
sibly applicable to offline social movements as well.

INTERNET PETITION CAMPAIGNS

Through its global reach, the Internet has greatly expanded the potential and use of a classic
mobilization device: the signature campaign. Online petition campaigns are perhaps the most
prominent of the new forms of contention made possible by recent developments in tech-
nology and communication. Online petition sites now mount thousands of petitions at a time,
including huge numbers aimed at influencing government policy. Heavily targeted
governments—including the US, UK, Germany and Australia—have established official petition
sites with the intent of bringing people’s concerns directly into parliamentary discussions. The
Obama administration, for example, launched an official petition site—“We The People”1 in
September 2011, where ordinary citizens could start and sign petitions. Petitions that received
over 25,000 signatures within a span of 30 days became eligible for an official response from
the appropriate federal department. A year later, close to 50,000 petitions had been created
with over 3 million signatures in total, and the White House had already issued responses to
1.1 million petitioners whose campaigns had reached the 25,000-signature threshold. The
White House then raised the threshold to 100,000 signatures.2
Literature in the new field of online movements suggests that petitions and e-mail
campaigns are promising tools for social movements, on both the political left and right
(McCaughey and Ayers 2003; Van De Donk, Loader, Nixon, and Rucht 2004; Langman
2005). In the summer of 2011, various Tea Party groups together launched a large-scale
signature campaign that called upon Tea-Party-sympathetic representatives and senators to
Emergent Mobilization Online 283

sign a “Cut, Cap, and Balance” pledge, demanding extraordinary restrictions on public spen-
ding in exchange for supporting an increase to the U.S. debt limit.3 Fully 230,000 citizens
signed the petition, and a recent study (Vasi, Strang, and Van de Rijt 2014) found that U.S.
representatives from districts with many signatories were significantly more likely to vote
against debt limit legislation that did not include the demanded cuts in public spending.
Scholars have identified several key advantages of Internet-based organizing over traditional
organizing. These advantages include the relative ease in coordination across vast geographical
distances since Internet activism eliminates the need for physical togetherness, and the extremely
low costs of communication and participation, both in terms of material resources and the safety
risks to participants (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010; Earl and Kimport 2011). These advantages
have been instrumental in establishing the Internet as an increasingly popular way for people to
register protest, increase awareness about an issue, create collective identities, and to generate
support for on-the-ground social movements (Diani 2000; Naughton 2001; Della Porta and
Mosca 2005; Carty and Onyett 2006; Russell 2007; Andrews and Caren 2010).
Over the years, as the impact of the Internet on nononline movements crystallized and the
potential of computer-mediated communication as a form of social organization increased,
there has been a concomitant growth in the literature analyzing the new forms of mobilization
(Rheingold 2002; Tracy 2002; Wellman, Boase, and Chen 2002; Fisher and Boekkooi 2009).
Clicktivism, hacktivism, smart mobs, networked individualism, virtual sit-ins, email floods,
and online petitioning are new concepts with which scholars have had to become acquainted
(Wellman 2001; Rheingold 2002; McCaughey and Ayers 2003). While there are many aspects
of online mobilization that make it distinct from on-the-ground mobilization—including the
nature of organization, its potential outreach, and the costs of participation (Bimber et al.
2005; Margetts et al. 2011)—researchers have also found that there are movement dynamics in
the online sphere that parallel those offline (Ayres 1999).
The rise and growing importance of Internet mobilization not only necessitate a better
understanding of these new mechanisms for contention, but also simultaneously enable novel
research methodologies and strategies. The online traces left behind by Internet activity pro-
vide accurate fine-grained data on previously intractable types of social behavior (Lazer,
Pentland, Adamic, Aral, Barabási, Brewer, Christakis, Contractor, Fowler, Gutmann, Jebara,
King, Macy, Roy, and Van Alstyne 2009). Large quantities of such data can be rapidly
collected in fully automated ways through computational algorithms (e.g., Van de Rijt, Shor,
Ward, and Skiena 2013). New analytical tools, when applied to mobilization on the Internet,
can also advance our general understanding of traditional collective action. The qualitative
analysis of millions of publicly posted textual conversations on Twitter and other social
networking sites, combined with network analysis of the patterns of communication, con-
stitutes a rich resource for the study of (virtual) on-the-ground organizing and mobilization
(Earl and Kimport 2011; Yasseri, Hale, and Margetts 2013; Lewis et al. 2014). Finally, a less
recognized but invaluable feature of online mobilization environments is the possibility for
live experimental intervention that can generate causal evidence through randomized control-
led trials (e.g. Restivo and Van de Rijt 2012; Bond, Farriss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle,
and Fowler 2012; Muchnik, Aral, and Taylor 2013; Van de Rijt et al. 2014). This article re-
ports on two field experiments designed to assess the importance of emergent processes in
mobilizing support and to identify the mechanisms involved.

LITERATURE ON MOVEMENT GROWTH AND SUPPORT

The timing and dynamics of transforming discontent into collective action has been a central
concern in social movement theory for at least eighty years (Du Bois 1935). This literature is
replete with evidence and arguments about the factors that determine the large variance in the
support generated by different organizing efforts, even in cases where conditions and appeal
284 Mobilization

were apparently similar. Key contributions to this scholarship include McCarthy and Zald’s
(1977) emphasis on the importance of resource acquisition; Aldon Morris’s (1984) stress on
indigenous networks transformed into social movement organizations; Doug McAdam, Sidney
Tarrow, and Charles Tilly’s (2001) focus on structural conduciveness in the surrounding social
structure; and Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper’s (2004) exploration of cultural factors that
animate mobilization. Within this larger body of literature many authors have focused on the
question of social movement success, developing a range of indicators including influencing
the content of public debate (McVeigh, Welch, and Bjarnason 2003), legislation (Cress and
Snow 2000; Soule and Olzak 2004), policy implementation (Andrews 2001; Kolb 2007), and
cultural mores (Giugni 1998).
Though size is certainly not the sine-qua-non indicator for movement success—one can
think of examples of powerful and successful social movements with relatively few members
or activists, such as the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (Arditti 1999)—the liter-
ature has treated the size of the movement as an important, if not primary, indicator of
successful mobilization. The recruitment of large numbers of members has been a useful and
valid indicator of movement efficacy. Key studies working from the full range of perspectives
have therefore focused on the intricate mechanisms that explain levels of participation,
documenting the relevance of many different explanatory variables (e.g., Schwartz 1976;
McAdam et al. 2001). This extensive body of scholarship can be roughly divided into two
traditions: the structuralist paradigm and the constructivist paradigm. The structuralist
paradigm emphasizes external factors that enable emergence and growth (such as resources,
contextual shifts, the nature of the state, elite power, alliance networks, etc.). The construc-
tivist paradigm emphasizes factors endogenous to the movements (such as organizational
structure, quality of leadership, strategies developed and enacted, frames that resonate with the
attitudes of the target population, etc.).
Opportunity structures, one of the key elements of most structuralist explanations,
generally refer to features of the parent social structure that influence whether people have the
social space in which to organize protest, whether they choose to organize protest, and
whether the protest will attract a critical mass capable of enacting the desired changes (Tilly
1978). Thus, given important grievances that are relevant to a large potential constituency, the
opportunity structure can constrain mobilization in various ways: some subgroups within the
aggrieved population may be economically unable to participate, others may lack access to
political leverage, and still others might be immersed in individualistic solutions (Schwartz
1976; Meyer 2004). Even when the opportunity structure is conducive, the constructivist
paradigm sensitizes us to further constraints on movement success deriving from movement
structure, such as the development of a strategy that will attract the available constituency.
Given this structural reality, then, only a tiny fraction of all mobilization efforts have the
potential for large-scale mobilization and only a handful of those have the potential to be
successfully mobilized.
What unites the two perspectives—and most social movement research—is that in
seeking an explanation for either successful or unsuccessful mobilization, the causal focus lies
in scrutinizing these a priori factors: the surrounding structure and the organizing strategy of
the activists (Tarrow 1989; Gamson and Meyer 1996).4 Without disputing the importance of
the causal forces that social movement analysts have identified and analyzed, most approaches
seek to understand differences in movement size by referencing factors that precede the
mobilization process itself. We contend that this a posteriori logic (looking back from the
outcome to the a priori causal nexus) leads analysts to overlook a complex set of emergent
processes that appear after the mobilization has begun or are created by the mobilization
itself, and that these emergent processes can have a major impact on the trajectory of the
protest. We further posit that these late-arising causal vectors are almost always unanticipated,
usually unintentional, often accidental, frequently spontaneous, and, in many circumstances,
self-reinforcing.
Emergent Mobilization Online 285

EMERGENT MECHANISMS IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT GROWTH

The unspoken premise that campaigns have more-or-less fixed potential based on a priori
structuralist and constructivist conditions—including opportunity structures, culture, elite
connections, formal organization, and framing—is called into question by an alternative
theoretical view that seeks (at least partial) explanations for the differential success of similar
mobilizations in unforeseeable, even random, in-process differences. This alternative per-
spective is rooted in formal models of collective action (Granovetter 1978; Oliver et al. 1985;
Müller and Opp 1986; Macy 1991; Heckathorn 1996; Kim and Bearman 1997) and social
contagions (Rogers 1962; Hedström 1994; Strang and Soule 1998; Centola and Macy 2007).
Theoretical development, however, has been mainly aimed at explaining self-reinforcing
processes more generally and has taken place with little cross-reference to the core social
movement literature. As a consequence, little attention has been paid to integrating the two
perspectives into a comprehensive understanding of social movement mobilization. A notable
exception is Pamela Oliver and Daniel Myers (2002) who argue for the importance of
combining stochastic logic with structural analysis to better explain the empirical profile of
social movements.
A key feature in the collective action literature is that crowds, physical or figurative,
generate feedback effects that alter an individual’s inclination to join. Specifically, a core
assumption that all models in this tradition have in common is that, particularly during the
early stages of mobilization, the probability of participation increases as the number of others
on board grows. For example, in Granovetter’s (1978) model of collective behavior, such early
positive feedback is modeled as individuals with thresholds that indicate the minimum number
of other individuals who must first participate. Individuals with threshold 0 participate spon-
taneously, thereby triggering the joining of individuals with threshold 1, 2, and so on. Alter-
natively, positive feedback may be modeled as an initially convex “production function”
(Oliver et al. 1985: 522) whereby the “profit” from contributing increases with the number of
people already contributing. The feedback effect eventually declines, thus creating an S-
shaped curve of participation (Macy 1991; Heckathorn 1996; Kim and Bearman 1997). In
Hedström’s (1994) model of “contagious collectives,” the likelihood of joining is a positive
linear function of the decision to join by friends.
While these formal models differ in mathematization, they share a common assumption
that participation by early adopters stimulates the participation of others. Such positive
feedback is also known as a bandwagon, domino, or snowball effect (Hirsch 1986; Gavious
and Mizrahi 1999). Note that these effects cannot be fit into a structuralist model, nor are they
consequences of movement strategy.
It is important to note that there are a variety of microlevel social mechanisms that can
produce such feedback. The ones that researchers have identified or postulated include:

Rationality. The participation of some may improve others’ perceived cost-benefit

assessment of participation, causing a virtuous cycle of expansion (Granovetter 1978;
Oliver et al. 1985; Müller and Opp 1986; Marwell, Oliver, and Prahl 1988; Oliver and
Marwell 1988; Heckathorn 1996; Kim and Bearman 1997; Centola and Macy 2007).

Legitimacy. Group size may positively affect the legitimacy of a campaign, reducing
resistance among those who doubt the goals or efficacy of the movement (Asch 1951;
Turner 1991; Gould 2002; DiPrete and Eirich 2006). Petitions with greater support may
be perceived by participants to target a more viable cause (Margetts et al. 2011).

Network diffusion. Knowledge of a movement as well as recruitment can spread through

informal networks in a snowball-like fashion if the initial participants are embedded in
loose-knit “weak tie” networks (Rogers 1962; Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson 1980;
286 Mobilization

Kim and Bearman 1997; Strang and Soule 1998; Sandell 1999; Lambiotte and Panzarasab
2009; Centola 2010).

Quality signal. Economists have proposed a mechanism of “information cascades,”

whereby people who lack the necessary information to make a choice on their own rely on
the prior choices of others. Therefore, the behavior of prior individuals becomes a signal to
guide their decision making (Bikhchandani, Hirsheifer, and Welch 1992; Hirshleifer 1995;
Morone, Fiore, and Sandri 2008). In a similar vein, psychologists have found that people
take the actions of others as a clue for what behavior is appropriate in a given situation, a
phenomenon referred to as “social proof” (Sherif 1935; Cialdini 1984).

Visibility: Sociologists and media scholars have shown that as supporters of an initiative
become more numerous, the likelihood of it becoming visible in the “public eye” also
increases (Koopmans 1993; Friedman 1999; Salganik, Watts, and Dodds 2006; King 2008).

Circular mobilization. Herbert Blumer’s (1951) theory of collective behavior posits an

affection-based mechanism, pointing to a “circular reaction” effect (p. 174), whereby
expressions of support (like petition signing) are recursively stimulating—reinforcing
participation among already recruited members and generating further organizing activity
and new recruits. In an instrumental variant of Blumer’s emotional mechanism, initial
recruitment success may encourage activists to intensify campaigning efforts and greater
subsequent recruitment (Vasi and Macy 2003).

This list is not intended to be fully exhaustive of all mechanisms that researchers have
postulated as drivers of positive feedback. However, it is important to note that the dynamics
underlying each of these mechanisms do not fit into either structuralist or constructivist
analysis, since they are not triggered or determined by the a priori variables investigated by
most social movement analyses. The network dynamics investigated by Rogers (1962) and
Sandell (1999) illustrate this difference: they conclude that parallel protests organized in two
structurally similar cities might vary dramatically in size depending on the extensiveness of
the pioneer organizers’ friendship networks, the degree to which they are embedded in weak-
tie networks that reach outward to a broad constituency, or the inclusion of either well-
connected or energetic individuals among the initial contacts. None of these essentially
accidental patterns are part of the constellation of structural or constructivist variables that
social movement theorists typically explore; they emerge as the mobilization process pro-
ceeds, and yet they could create drastic differences in the size, the impact, and even the activ-
ities engaged in by the protestors.
 All of the above mechanisms (and many others) have the potential to produce positive
feedback, illustrating how emergent elements can have important implications for differential
growth rates across movements. If some or all of these mechanisms are operating during par-
allel mobilization campaigns—notably in cities or communities with similar underlying
structural conditions—one should expect diverging outcomes to emerge from similar initial
efforts at mobilization. We posit that these initially small differences can, through positive
feedback, yield dramatically different results, ranging from failure to attract a critical mass of
participants to mobilizing large demonstrations (Oliver et al. 1985). That is, the distribution of
mobilization outcomes would exhibit large and substantively significant variance.
It is clear from existing evidence that online petitions fit this predicted pattern: nearly all
campaigns fail to raise more than a handful of signatures, while a small minority becomes
extremely successful. For their analysis of 20,000 e-petitions submitted to the UK govern-
ment, Yasseri, Hale, and Margetts (2013: 1) conclude, “Over 99 percent fail to get the 10,000
signatures required for an official response and only 0.1 percent attain the 100,000 required for
a parliamentary debate.” It is also clear that a considerable proportion of this variance derives
from structuralist and constructivist conditions. The research issue is, therefore, whether a
Emergent Mobilization Online 287

substantively important portion of this variance derives from endogenous processes. Stated as
a proposition, we posit that when structural conduciveness, frame resonance, and other a priori
factors are similar or identical, parallel protests will still exhibit high variance in success. This
variance is generated by social feedback setting in motion self-reinforcing dynamics that
operate orthogonally to structural forces and intrinsic movement support. As Oliver and
Meyers (2002: 20) put it, from the point of view of organizers who cannot control or even
anticipate the operation of these stochastic processes, “It is basically a matter of luck who gets
reinforced when, and . . . there is a high level of indeterminacy and volatility in outcome tra-
jectories.” In this way, feedback of unpredictable initial differences and/or perturbations may
generate much of the observed inequality in movement support.5
We may thus derive three hypotheses. The first seeks to identify and validate the exis-
tence of positive feedback attached to the specific emergent mechanisms:

H1: Internet petition campaigns exhibit positive feedback: The higher the current number of
signatures already accumulated, the greater the likelihood that others will sign too.

The second seeks to document the magnitude of the impact that these emergent processes can
have on the size of collective action:

H2: Otherwise similar petitions can accumulate drastically different numbers of signatures.

Our third and final hypothesis concerns the temporal predictability that emerges from the
presumed path dependence. If, as collective action theories assume, the inclination to sign is
heavily dependent on the number of prior signatories, then the later success of petitions should
be predictable from their early success:

H3: Among a priori similar petitions, the number of early signatories is a strong predictor of
the number of later signatories.

CONTROLLED FIELD EXPERIMENTS IN MOBILIZATION ANALYSIS

The factors underlying social movement growth are hard to disentangle empirically. What
presents itself as a bandwagon dynamic—supporters joining crowds that have already
accumulated significant support while failing to join others with smaller initial membership—
may actually represent latent heterogeneity in a priori factors such as structural conduciveness,
organizing strategies, size of target constituency, or access to needed material resources. The
tendency for initially bigger campaigns to subsequently attract more supporters than initially
smaller campaigns may thus stem from hard-to-measure differences in framing the issue and/or
the resourcefulness of the campaign. Such heterogeneity in a priori chances of success may make
it seem as if people are joining campaigns that have reached a threshold size, when they are
actually joining or supporting campaigns that are institutionally, structurally, and/or resource-
wise more able to effectively reach out to them. In this scenario, new supporters join bigger
movements not because of the endogenous dynamics we propose, but rather because of fixed,
underlying interest and opportunity structures that destined them to be larger. The challenge we
face in testing our hypotheses is to control the a priori effects in order to demonstrate the
existence and significance of endogenous effects (Allison 1980; DiPrete and Eirich 2006).
To effectively disentangle the factors at play in movement growth—and more particularly
to test the existence and magnitude of emergent factors—we conducted controlled experi-
ments on a popular online petition website. Through the application of “signature shocks” to
random petitions, and through the construction of similar petitions, we were able to control the
a priori variables affecting mobilization. Such experimental control traditionally comes at the
cost of realism and generalizability. Standard laboratory experiments in campus basements are
288 Mobilization

limited by the degree to which undergraduate student behavior can shed light on what drives
naturally occurring social phenomena (Pager and Western 2012). However, the increasing
dominance of the Internet in mobilization and movement communication has not only made
social behavior on the Internet more relevant for the study of social movements, but it has also
provided a means for conducting controlled experiments in live environments (Bond et al.
2012; Restivo and Van de Rijt 2012). Our research method involves randomized experimental
intervention in naturally occurring instances of social and political mobilization.

Research Site

Our study’s research site is a popular online petition website: www.change.org. Individuals
and groups who are energized around a political, social, legal, or personal cause can—after
creating an account with a functional e-mail and postal address—initiate a signature campaign
with only a few mouse clicks. Visitors to the website can then sign the petition either anon-
ymously or with full public disclosure. The website hosts millions of petitions, ranging in
domain from the political (“[Governor], stop wolf trapping in Montana”) to business
(“[Company], stop mandatory prescription by mail only”), to entertainment (“[Network], keep
comedian x on the air”). An example of an exceptionally popular petition is shown in figure 1.
The open-access user initiation policy has the virtue of allowing us to fully control the struc-
tural and constructivist differences among the petitions we study.
By March of 2014, the website was operative in 196 countries and had hosted 65 million
petitions. Our experiments were carried out using only the U.S. site where easy, widespread
internet access and few sanctions for supporting the petitions makes participation
prototypically low risk and requires minimal time investment for organizers. Since the nature
and dynamics of petition signing would differ significantly in nonvirtual and/or repressive
political contexts, further research will be required to assess how the dynamics we identify
here operate in these environments.

Figure 1: A Popular Change.org Petition

Emergent Mobilization Online 289

The research protocols of both our experiments were approved by the Committees on
Research Involving Human Subjects (IRB) at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook (CORIHS #2012-1895). In the experiments members of the research team, which
consisted of both genders and a variety of ages and ethnicities, created user profiles at
Change.org. They did not report their age, gender, or ethnicity, as neither type of information
was required by the website.

Experiment 1

This experiment was designed to test hypothesis 1 (H1), that signatures breed more signa-
tures. In experiment 1 we exogenously induced signature jolts to arbitrarily selected petitions,
expecting to increase the likelihood of signing by subsequent website visitors.6 Given the ex-
treme baseline variation in popularity across petitions on the website, we anticipated high
variance in our dependent variable, orthogonal to our treatment. We took several measures to
reduce the risk of a type II error: We sampled a large number of cases, strengthening the
treatment by applying multiple added signatures, and only considered petitions that had been
inactive for some time. Specifically, we selected petitions that:

• Had acquired no more than fifteen signatures already (so that adding signatures
would noticeably increase support)
• Had not been signed in the past twenty-four hours (so that the petition was not in the
midst of a signing spree)
• Had been initiated in the past fourteen days (so that the campaign had not lost its
relevance)
• Had advocated action that all members of the research team were comfortable
supporting (thereby respecting the site’s community guidelines and terms of service
stating that users are not to deceive or misrepresent themselves).7

In addition to reducing orthogonal variance in our dependent variable, the above selection
criteria also prevented site-specific feedback mechanisms from impacting our analysis. In
particular, they exclude campaigns that have amassed large numbers of signatures at an early
stage, which are posted on a popular petitions list and are targeted by the Change.org team for
advertisement through email to potential signatories who have signed similar petitions.
We identified 200 petitions that satisfied these criteria. We randomly assigned these
petitions to either our treatment or our control condition. Our research team then added a
dozen anonymous signatures to the 100 petitions in the treatment condition, while withholding
signatures from the remaining 100 petitions in the control condition. We added the signatures
all at once, thereby avoiding timing effects. We tracked the number of additional signatures
that each petition acquired in the subsequent weeks.
The experimental design is visually represented in figure 2. The key feature of the design
is that by varying initial popularity orthogonally to any other factors affecting signature poten-
tial, a causal link is established between treatment and any cross-condition difference in post-
treatment popularity of petitions. In other words, the research design assured that more appeal-
ing petitions would be randomly assigned to the test and control groups. Though differential
appeal (including structural conduciveness and petition strategy) might account for differences

Figure 2: Design of Experiment 1

Treatment 12
Petitions Random Assignment
Control 0
290 Mobilization

within the two groups, average differences between the test and control groups would neces-
sarily be a consequence of the added signatures. Higher numbers of new signatures in the
treatment group would therefore constitute causal evidence in support of hypothesis 1 (H1) that
there is a feedback effect in petition signing.

Results of Experiment 1

Figure 3 shows the number of signatures petitions in each condition had accumulated at
the end of the second week, by which time signatory activity had mostly ceased. Because the
petitions in experiment 1 had already been posted for a while and had received no new signa-
tures in the twenty-four hours prior to the initiation of the experiment, overall signatory
activity during the two weeks was low by design.
To measure the direct effect of the treatment on the rate of petition signing (without
including indirect effects of signatures following the treatment on yet later signatures), we
dichotomized the response variable, determining for each condition the number of cases in
which additional signatures were collected, and the remaining cases in which petitions failed
to recruit any additional signatories. We then performed a Fisher exact test for independence.8
Cases in the experimental condition were more likely to have received additional signatures
after two weeks than cases in the control condition (66% vs. 52%) but this difference falls just
short of statistical significance at the .05 level in a two-sided test (p = .060).
To evaluate the total treatment effect (including indirect effects of signatures following
the treatment on yet later signatures) we compared post-treatment totals across conditions.
Given strong distributional skew and unequal variance, we performed a two-sided rank-sum
test, obtaining exact significance levels through Monte Carlo simulation of the random assign-
ment process (Fisher 1935; Rosenbaum 2002). While the average number of signatures is
higher in the experimental condition than in the control condition (2.32 vs. 1.74), this dif-
ference falls short of statistical significance at the 95% level (z = 1.76; p = .079).9
We then relaxed the assumption of a constant additive treatment effect (Ho and Imai
2006; Gerber and Green 2012), exploring the possibility that our intervention operated as a
multiplier on petition support growth, eliciting larger effects for petitions with more initial sig-

Figure 3: Number of New Signatures after Two Weeks, by Experimental Group.

40
Number of Petitions

20

0
0 10 20
Number of New Signatures Accumulated
Emergent Mobilization Online 291

natures.10 Accordingly, we redefined our dependent variable as a growth percentage, namely

the number of signatures raised after the intervention as a percentage of the number of
signatures raised before the intervention. Figure 4 shows the average treatment effect on this
alternative dependent variable with exact confidence intervals obtained through Monte Carlo
simulation. The effect is positive and increases until day 6, when it becomes statistically
significant at the .05 level. The effect remains of similar magnitude afterwards – as overall
signatory activity becomes minimal – and loses statistical significance during the final days of
the second week. Taken together, the modest and marginally significant treatment effects of
Experiment 1 lead us to cautiously accept H1: that—ceteris paribus—additional signatures to
petitions increase the rate of signature accrual.

Figure 4: Treatment Effect on Signature Growth Percentage, by Day Since Treatment.

10
Additional Growth in Treatment

-10

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Days Since Treatment
Note: Exact 95% confidence intervals were obtained from a Monte Carlo permutation test.

Experiment 2

To test hypothesis 2 (H2) that petitions with essentially similar a priori profiles (structural
conduciveness, framing, potential constituency) can accumulate drastically different numbers
of signatures, we initiated four sets of ten similar petitions.11 All petitions posted on the web-
site sought action toward defending animal rights, with only the type of animal rights violation
and the focal animal varying from petition to petition. One set of ten petitions called for the
prohibition of killing animals for fur, with each petition designating a different animal to be
protected (e.g., rabbits, seals, bears, and so on). A second set of ten called for the prohibition
of using animals in research, again designating a different animal each time. Two other sets of
ten addressed the decline in animal habitats and campaigned against keeping animals as exotic
pets. All petitions were provided with the minimum of five signatures necessary for inclusion
on the recent petitions list that is visible to casual visitors to the Change.org website.12
Because this list follows the order of petition creation, we temporally separated petitions.
292 Mobilization

These time lags shielded against animal petitions queuing up on the list of “recent” petitions,
preventing them from being perceived as a cluster.

Results of Experiment 2

We analyze daily records of signatures that accumulated over the course of a year. Figure
5 shows the total number of signatures accumulated by each of the four sets of petitions at the
end of the year. The petitions are displayed in ascending order by their one-year signature
totals. We remark first that the four different types of abuse differ noticeably in typical num-
bers of accumulated signatures. Audiences appear more eager to sign petitions against the
killing of animals for their skin and against the use of animals in scientific experimentation
than they are to support petitions against pet ownership or disturbance of animals’ natural
habitat. These differences in baseline issue popularity are statistically significant (Kruskal-
Wallis test: χ2 = 13.67; df = 3; p < .01).
Within issue categories, signature totals vary dramatically. In each category the most
popular petition raised twenty to fifty times as many signatures as the least popular petition,
despite both addressing the same animal rights issue. The extreme variation in signature vol-
ume in figure 5 supports hypothesis 2: Even when campaigns are very similar, large differ-
ences in the level of public support may nonetheless be obtained. All petitions were aimed at
the same animal rights issues, all petitions were observable by the same audience (those log-
ging on to Change.org), all petitions had the same initiator (our research team), all petitions
utilized an identical recruitment strategy (singular posting on Change.org), and all petitions
were embedded in the same structural environment (at Change.org). And yet, some petitions
attracted over 3,500 supporters, while others were signed by fewer than ten people.
The design of experiment 2 leaves open the theoretical possibility that the extreme vari-
ation in the number of signatures reflects the dramatically different appeal of different animals.

Figure 5: Signatures Accumulated after One Year by Four Sets of Similar Petitions
Emergent Mobilization Online 293

Past research suggests that some animal types evoke feelings of varying strength and senti-
ment among humans than others and thus generate varying levels of support for issues
connected to animal rights (Angier 2010; Trimble and Van Aarde 2010; Ballouard, Brischoux,
and Bonnet 2011; Waldau 2013). These studies suggest that common pets, cute animals, and
cognitively sophisticated animals would do well, while animals associated with pests and
phobias would fare much worse. These predictions do not generally hold true in figure 5. It is
true that mice, rats, snakes, iguanas and tarantulas all did poorly overall. Yet so did many pets,
including cats, dogs, and chinchillas. Rabbits and pandas did very well, but traditionally cute
animals such as seals and turtles raised trivial numbers of signatures. Several large and cog-
nitively highly developed animals lost to small rodents.
Still, someone could argue that the figure 5 rankings of animals are nonetheless intuitive
to them, roughly following some underlying animal hierarchy of public concern. Such a
person would argue that public concern over minks being killed for their fur is “of course”
greater than public concern over rabbits being killed for their fur, which is in turn “obviously”
greater than concern for foxes and bears, and so on. We can test for the existence of such an
underlying hierarchy by tracking the temporal distribution patterns of petition signing. A
stable public support hierarchy would predict a steady and consistent flow of signatures over
time with the highest-ranked animals always garnering more support than the lowest-ranked
animals. In other words, if intrinsic popularity differences among animals for specific issues
were a dominant determinant of variability in signature support, then such differences would
consistently manifest themselves throughout the year we monitored the petitions.
Table 1 shows the distribution of the first, second, third, and final quartile (25%) of signa-
tures across petitions within each issue category, as well as the number of days it took to
produce these signatures. Note that, by definition, column totals are the same for all four
quartiles and that the number of days adds up to 365 (a year).13

Table 1.Temporal Distribution of Signatures by Quartile. Lead Petitions are Gray.

294 Mobilization

Table 1 reveals that, contrary to the notion of a stable hierarchy, petitions that experienced
early success were often not the ones that accumulated most signatures in later periods. In the
skin petitions race rabbits enjoyed a large early lead. However, bears and raccoons, which had
so far been in second-to-last and last positions, received the highest and second highest share
of second-quartile signatures. In the third and fourth quartile, minks took over the lead,
enjoying a large unexpected surge, emerging as the solid overall victor at the end of the year.
Clearly, anyone who after the first 71 days (first quartile) had dared to conclude that the
running signature totals accurately reflected the greater worrying of the general public about
the suffering of rabbits vis-à-vis the suffering of minks and the total disinterest in the killing of
bears would have seen their theory completely rejected well before the end of the year, with
matters looking steadily worse and worse as the remaining signatures rolled in.
Similarly low levels of predictability are observed for the relative popularity of animal habi-
tat petitions: first gorillas, then pandas, and then polar bears took the lead during the first ten
days. During the remainder of the year, signatures mostly went to chimps and elephants,
which had not yet raised any signatures. Public outrage with unusual pets initially focused on
bears, after which capuchins, initially in second place, and chimps, so far ignored by the
public, split most of the remaining signatures. Rabbits took an early lead in petitioning against
use of animals in laboratory testing. Then chimps, which had initially been in the second-to-
last spot took over the lead. After that guinea pigs, which had so far been trailing behind,
became dominant in the third quarter, when more than half a year of campaigning had already
gone by.
The table 1 results refute the claim that animal-level differences in intrinsic public support
dominated the determination of signature volume. Likewise, they are also inconsistent with the
formal literature on collective action which predicts that whatever hierarchy emerges at an
early stage will tend to perpetuate itself throughout the mobilization process. Instead, we see
dramatic changes in the relative ranks at which different petitions attract signatories through-
out the mobilization dynamics. This leads us to reject hypothesis 3 that signatory dynamics
quickly lock into a self-replicating hierarchy of petition popularity.

MECHANISM: ACCIDENTAL ACTIVATION

Table 1 reveals an interesting dynamic feature: Some petitions reach a temporary plateau in
mobilization, but then suddenly experience a surge of signatures that lifts them to a new level
of support. Minks were the subject of an extremely late surge in the skin category, accumu-
lating nearly two thousand signatures, half of their final total, during the final three days of the
year. Pandas accumulated their 124 signatories that made them second quartile winner in the
habitat category in a single day. Other late surges include a two week period during the third
quartile when chimps experienced a major revival in the pets issue category while capuchins,
the ultimate winner after a late-game surge, raised no signatures at all during this same two
week period.
The jolts are suggestive of endogenous processes, but not those hypothesized by standard
collective action models. The various studies in the collective action literature all predict en-
dogenous surges, based on self-reinforcing cascades of support. However, once clear differ-
ences in mobilization have emerged it predicts these differences to keep growing, generating a
stable hierarchy as a result. This prediction does not match the pinball-like surprise surges in
our study that occur long after clear differences in support have already emerged. The jolts are
not just large random influences but instead dominate the effects of past support identified in
experiment 1. Rather than perpetuating existing differences in popularity they produce insta-
bility and overthrow past popularity regimes.
We conjecture that the jolts are caused by unanticipated activists who upon learning about
the campaign spontaneously helped the mobilization. These enthusiasts may have been, for
Emergent Mobilization Online 295

example, individuals located in bridging positions of intersecting social networks (Granovetter

1981; Burt 1992; Kim and Bearman 1997), influential individuals whose signature attracted
the attention of their following (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Merton 1968), or signatories who
after signing posted a hyperlink to the petition on a prominent website. In this explanation, the
long pauses and stretches of low activity preceding the bursts are caused by the long reaction
times of lukewarm supporters upstream of enthusiasts in the diffusion process (Barabási 2005,
2010). While our experimental design was not aimed at isolating any generative mechanism,
our controlling of the mobilization efforts of the original petition creators provides leverage
and increased confidence in the proposed mechanism. Typically, in regular observational,
uncontrolled analysis of petitions such jolts in petition signing could be caused by a competing
mechanism: reinvigorated efforts on behalf of the original mobilizer. That is, the petition
creator might have renewed their campaign efforts in response to receiving new signatures.
Because in our study we ourselves acted as the petition creators, we could guarantee that the
petition creators did not engage in any mobilization efforts beyond the initial launch. There-
fore, we can rule out the possibility that the original mobilizer’s reinvigorated efforts caused
the jolts seen in the experiment 2 data.
We considered another possibility, namely that popularity dynamics were impacted by
institutional feedback mechanisms. None of our petitions reached the very top levels of
popularity that prominent petitions on Change.org’s popular petitions list have, precluding this
visibility mechanism from impacting the signatory dynamics. However, the Change.org team
communicated to us that it sometimes differentially advertises petitions that quickly accumu-
late hundreds of signatures immediately after they launch. We cannot rule out the possibility
that some of our experiment 2 petitions that did very well during the first week or so after
launch may have been affected by such advertisement.14 However, this effect, if present,
would produce increasing gaps between successful and unsuccessful petitions and increased
predictability of future mobilization, whereas we find limited evidence for feedback and we
find low predictability. Also, the fact that such institutional intervention only takes place soon
after the creation of the petition leaves us unable to account for the unexpected jolts that
campaigns experience many months after launch.
We then sought further support for the proposition that secondary mobilizers were respon-
sible for the large sudden jolts in table 1 by tracing the individuals on public social networking
sites who signed before the jolts occurred, which was possible if their user names revealed
their actual names. Interestingly, we found that the many jolts in signature volume could
indeed be attributed to signatories posting those particular petitions on networking sites (such
as Facebook or Twitter) just days before the jolt, which then made them visible to a new batch
of supporters. This provides suggestive evidence for an “accidental activation” mechanism
whereby social diffusion processes may randomly stumble upon influential or highly engaged
supporters who qualitatively alter the dynamics of mobilization.

DISCUSSION

Our research design has important methodological features that are adaptable to several pre-
viously intractable research challenges, including at least some relevant to offline social move-
ments. First, our study differs from most empirical work on social movements because our
experimental method allows us to collect data on multiple and comparable campaigns. The
majority of the empirical studies of collective action focuses on a single movement or cam-
paign, foregoing comparative analysis. Studies seeking to compare large numbers of move-
ments depend on arduous individualized data collection for each movement and must contend
with uncontrolled differences in structural and strategic factors. To remedy these problems,
past studies have often broken down national movements geographically into states or
districts, or international movements into country-specific campaigns, which are then
296 Mobilization

compared with one another (for a noteworthy exemplar, see Gamson 1975). However, discrete
geographical units are not necessarily structurally comparable, nor are they independent,
especially when affected by national or international debate and media attention. These causal
dependencies create daunting problems for statistical inference and identification problems in
distinguishing the sources of different outcomes. Our designs through careful execution mini-
mized these problems.
Second, through randomization we were able to causally isolate positive feedback effects
in online petitioning. Our usage of experimental methods creates leverage for social move-
ment scholars to compellingly demonstrate the operation of the causal processes of key
interest, which is not possible in nonexperimental situations. Moreover, the external validity
limitations of classic experimental laboratory studies are minimized by employing the experi-
mental methods in live online environments.
Third, our study contained data on small-scale and unsuccessful mobilization attempts.
Most collective action research focuses on very large movements significant enough to merit
special study, with the civil rights movement topping the list. The fifty-four studies reviewed
by Amenta, Caren, Chiarello, and Su (2010), without exception, focused on major campaigns
of national or international scale. Yet the vast majority of mobilization attempts fail to reach a
critical mass, and without data on these failed cases it is impossible to identify causes of dif-
ferential success. An important and interesting exception is a recent experimental study by
Margetts et al. (2011) in which subjects were asked to consider six issues successively and
sign the petition and/or donate twenty pence toward the goal. The authors artificially varied
the number of prior signatories all the way from only a few hundred to millions. They found
no difference in the likelihood of signing a petition or donating money to a charity when the
subjects were either informed that only dozens of individuals had previously expressed
support or when there were thousands or tens of thousands of prior signatories. Only in a third
condition, in which it was suggested that over a million signatories had previously signed a
petition, did subjects exhibit an increased likelihood of signing (but not donating). These
results provide a contrast to those of our experiment 1, in which feedback effects were mar-
ginally significant even at very low levels of support. A key difference between our study and
Margetts’s is that the latter limited its feedback effects to social influence only. The in vivo
nature of our experiment 1 allowed other real-world social feedback mechanisms to feed the
dynamics as well, such as renewed enthusiasm by petitioners in response to our intervention.
The difference we find between the Margetts et al. study and ours suggests that social influ-
ence may not be the dominant feedback mechanism in online petitioning.
Our experiments yield a number of useful generalizations about the dynamics of online
petitions that could enhance our understanding of social movement analysis:

• Experiment 1 demonstrates positive feedback processes are operative in online mob-

ilization.
• The large, emergent differences in signature totals of very similar petitions in
experiment 2 indicate that endogenous processes occurring after the launch of a
campaign can be a major determinant of petition success. This finding presents what
appears to be a fundamental limitation to structuralist and constructivist analyses:
even if it were possible to take all relevant a priori variables into account in an anal-
ysis, the prevalence of endogenous dynamics would make the size of mobilization
hard to predict.
• From experiment 2 we also see that the primary feedback dynamic is not one
involving a growing stream of new signatories persuaded by the ever-greater chance
of success. Instead, it appears to involve an increasing probability that the social
diffusion process undergirding the mobilization process happens to recruit an
enthusiastic activist who through secondary mobilization produces a jolt of new
signatures among their following. The magnitude of these jolts is so strong that they
Emergent Mobilization Online 297

can completely upset and reverse emerging differentiation in the relative signatory
success of distinct petitions. The implication that follows is that, unlike what basic
models of collective action predict, even after launch, mobilization success remains
mostly unpredictable.

The differential accumulation of signatures among structurally similar petitions appears to

involve a set of endogenous events that fit the description of “accidental activation,” which
may in turn generate another spurt of new signatures. Further substantial increases await the
next event, which can occur at random among a set of similar petitions. The most successful
petitions thus cannot be easily predicted at an early stage in the campaign, since the ultimate
success depends on accumulating a number of jolts and their short-lived cascades. It is
precisely because endogenous events are not related to, or strongly predictable from, the struc-
tural precursors of the mobilization (or the early endogenous events) that they appear as
accidental, uncontrollable, or unforeseeable.
It is interesting to note that in a recent study Yasseri et al. (2013), using nonexperimental
data from a similar online petitioning website, reached a very different conclusion regarding
the predictability of later success from early success. Correlating early signatures against later
volumes, the Yasseri et al. study concluded that the fate of the typical online petition is
determined within the first ten hours—that is, those that attract more signatures during those
crucial ten hours maintain and even extend their lead as time goes on. The key difference with
the present study is that the petitions studied by Yasseri et al. differed vastly in subjects, goals,
target audiences, and other a priori factors. We conjecture that this variability must have
provided the room for the differences in structural conditions to produce large differences
among petitions soon after launch and that these initial advantages were maintained as the
campaigns progressed. The take-away message from our study is not that it is generally im-
possible to tell which campaigns will succeed at raising many signatures. Large and critical
differences in subject and framing decisively impact mobilization potential. Our point is rather
that two campaigns of similar a priori mobilization potential will often still realize very
different levels of mobilization because of the very large impacts that unanticipated events and
interventions by activists triggered during the mobilization process itself may have on the
subsequent speed and direction of the campaign.
Two key limitations of our results merit specific discussion. First, our experiments
identified the existence of large emergent processes in online petition campaigns. These
processes create a surge of signatures and a positive, cascade effect of these surges on the
probability of subsequent signatures. Our experiments did not codify, however, the specific
mechanisms driving these effects. We presented suggestive evidence indicating that one
operative mechanism was “accidental activation”—that knowledge of a campaign spread
through online social networks as secondary enthusiasts took up petitions they encountered.
Perhaps the most pressing research issue is therefore to fully explore the “accidental
activation” phenomenon and related dynamics that can induce these surges and the subsequent
cascade. It is clear that, in some instances, the activated nodes were influential or enthusiastic
individuals who marshaled their resources to inform or mobilize others. Our results thus
constitute an existence proof for some types of emergent processes that we believe are
important in social movement mobilization. However, they do not identify the contingent
conditions that determine when they operate, including their interaction with the structural and
strategic factors emphasized by social movement theorists. The exploration of these issues is,
we believe, amenable to further experimentation.
Second, while we believe that the dynamics studied in this research are generalizable to
online petition campaigns and closely related forms of activism, it is unclear to what extent the
same processes are at work in other forms of activism, particularly offline collective protest.
We note that our experiments involve much lower participation thresholds than offline
activities such as demonstrations, and that the desired goals of petition-signing campaigns are
298 Mobilization

usually easily identifiable by potential signers (Marsh 1977; Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010).
These and related characteristics may lead to very specific dynamics of recruitment and
participation that cannot be transferred to other protest.
While we acknowledge that results of our experiments generalize only to the important
but narrow world of online petitions, we also believe that the general processes we identify
can be found in nonvirtual petition campaigns and in many other forms of offline collective
protest. While further research will be needed to validate such extensions, we note that on-the-
ground social movements are replete with examples of apparent endogenous processes during
movement cycles—dramatic changes in size and effectiveness of collective action that reflect
unplanned and unforeseen developments occurring after the collective protest began. Con-
sider, for example, the Montgomery bus boycott, generally marked as the beginning of the
modern civil rights movement (Robnett 2000). Rosa Parks triggered the boycott on December
1, 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a National City Lines bus to a white passenger.
Parks was not, however, the first person to engage in such an act. Only nine months earlier a
15 year old school girl, Claudette Colvin, had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger,
which also resulted in her arrest and a court case.15 Unlike Parks however, Colvin was not the
well-known and respected secretary of the NAACP. She was, in fact, pregnant out of wedlock
at the time of her bus defiance and not well recognized or networked in the community. These
differences certainly played a role in determining that Rosa Parks’ defiance would grow into a
large boycott campaign because, in effect, she was a key node in the activist networks of
Montgomery.
Among the many features that made her a key node was her long-term relationship with
two other key activists and their organizations: Montgomery NAACP president Edgar Nixon
and Women’s Political Council leader Jo Ann Robinson. These groups mobilized around the
incident, activating all their networks to call for a one-day bus boycott of all National City
Lines buses. Though the one-day boycott was planned by Parks and some other organizers
(and can therefore be seen as an a priori strategy), the size and effectiveness of the protest far
exceeded the expectations of the original core organizers. This emergent phenomenon led to a
decision to continue the protest until bus segregation was abandoned (Robnett 2000). Parks
was thus the node that triggered what became a huge movement, but its shape and size were
altered by events and processes that occurred during the mobilization process. The ultimate
shape and success of the protest resulted from a combination of a priori factors, emergent
dynamics, and new strategic inputs that created a cycle of increasing size and strength.
A similar combination of structural, constructivist, and endogenous dynamics can be
discerned in the sit-in movement. The students who sat in at the Greensboro North Carolina
Woolworth’s on February 1, 1960 were utilizing a tactic with at least twenty years of history
in the South. The four students who initiated it were key nodes, tied in to what Morris (1984)
has called the “local movement center,” which mobilized students and community support,
generating its unanticipated growth as more and more students joined the struggle. It then
spread throughout the border states of the South, hitting other key nodes in the (latent) activist
networks among traditionally black colleges in another virtuous cycle of increasing size and
strength (Morris 1984).
Further research is needed to codify both the degree to which the processes we find in
online petitions can be found in nonvirtual collective action and the ways in which they
operate in these different environments. The results presented here additionally suggest that a
full understanding of offline social movement trajectories will require exploring the accidental
activation of in-process dynamics that cannot be anticipated by organizers or predicted by
observers. At the same time, there is value in recognizing what is unique about how the
Internet enables individuals to suddenly refuel a stagnating e-initiative and render growth so
erratic. What used to take a well-connected activist considerable planning and effort may
nowadays need no more than the pressing of a “forward” button.
Emergent Mobilization Online 299

NOTES
1
petitions.whitehouse.gov.
2
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/09/04/we-people-3-million-signatures-later.
3
http://rsc.scalise.house.gov/uploadedfiles/cut-cap-balance_1-pager.pdf .
4
It should be noted that organizing strategy can be altered during the mobilization process, but this alteration constitutes
an adjustment to fit with the permissive a priori conditions. The phenomena we are studying arise during the process.
5
We reiterate that these processes are not contradictory to the structural dynamics, but rather orthogonal to them. For
collective action taking place in a structurally conducive environment, these dynamics can amplify or mute the level
of mobilization or have little effect on its structural destiny. For movements operating in an unconducive environment,
they can produce surprising levels of mobilization or work in consonant with the structure to suppress the protest.
6
Some of the experiment 1 results are also reported in Van de Rijt et al (2014).
7
For further information on the site’s policies please see these links: http://www.change.org/about/community-
guidelines; http://www.change.org/about/terms-of-service.
8
The high degree of similarity between the experiment 2 petitions raises the concern that petitions may share many
signatories, raising questions about whether it is reasonable to treat the petitions as independently evolving. To
investigate this, we used demographic information from signatories to identify cases in which an individual signed
more than one of the forty petitions. We found that the vast majority of signatories (79%) signed only one of our forty
petitions. Of the remaining 21% half signed only two petitions. As a result, any two petitions shared virtually no
signatories, alleviating concerns about independence of observations.
9
If instead of a rank-sum test statistic for the permutation test we use a t statistic, which is more sensitive to outliers and
the strong distributional skew in the outcome variable, test results are again not statistically significant (t = .959; p = .351).
10
Indeed, in negative binomial regression of post-treatment totals we find that the treatment effect is insignificant
when the treatment is the sole predictor, but it becomes significant and larger in magnitude when pretreatment totals
are controlled. Because the negative binomial model has a multiplicative formulation of effects, this provides support
for the assumption of a multiplicative treatment effect.
11
In order to remain in compliance with the site’s terms of service, we avoided identical (duplicate) petitions.
12
As in experiment 1, in experiment 2 our team again contributed just five signatures to half the petitions and
seventeen to the other half. This treatment produced no significant effect. For completeness of reporting we note this
design element in this footnote, but for parsimony of presentation we chose not to discuss it further. Extreme within-
condition variance in petition popularity reduces statistical power to a minimum, thus preventing any meaningful
inference.
13
We also investigated the alternative version of table 1 with the year divided up into quarters (three month periods)
rather than signature quartiles. This alternative table leads to the same conclusion of dramatically shifting hierarchies.
However, the patterns are less clear because of the uneven distribution of signatures over the course of a year, with
more signatures occurring during earlier quarters.
14
Our petitions had the greatest visibility during the first hours they were posted as they appeared prominent on the recent
petitions list. The data show that none of the 40 petitions in experiment 2 had a great uptick during those early hours.
15
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/03/01/a-forgotten-contribution.html.

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