IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/polstu/v63y2015i2p278-299.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action

Author

Listed:
  • Helen Z. Margetts
  • Peter John
  • Scott A. Hale
  • Stéphane Reissfelder

Abstract

type="main"> 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Helen Z. Margetts & Peter John & Scott A. Hale & Stéphane Reissfelder, 2015. "Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 63(2), pages 278-299, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:polstu:v:63:y:2015:i:2:p:278-299
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-9248.12075
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brigitte Huber & Manuel Goyanes & Homero Gil de Zúñiga, 2021. "Linking Extraversion to Collective and Individual Forms of Political Participation: The Mediating Role of Political Discussion," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 102(4), pages 1289-1310, July.
    2. Lu, Peng, 2016. "Predicting peak of participants in collective action," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 274(C), pages 318-330.
    3. Helen Briassoulis, 2021. "Becoming E-Petition: An Assemblage-Based Framework for Analysis and Research," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(1), pages 21582440211, March.
    4. Lu, Peng & Yao, Qi & Lu, Pengfei, 2019. "Two-stage predictions of evolutionary dynamics during the rumor dissemination," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 517(C), pages 349-369.
    5. Vincent Pasquier & Alex J Wood, 2018. "The power of social media as a labour campaigning tool: lessons from OUR Walmart and the Fight for 15," Post-Print hal-01903758, HAL.
    6. Lu, Peng & Nie, Shizhao, 2019. "The strength distribution and combined duration prediction of online collective actions: Big data analysis and BP neural networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 535(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:polstu:v:63:y:2015:i:2:p:278-299. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0032-3217 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.