Do Online Petitions Actually Change Policy?

In 2015, Taiwan launched the Join platform, a digital democracy tool that empowers all Taiwanese citizens to start petitions. Although anyone can create a petition for any cause, the government is only required to respond after 5,000 signatures are collected. At that point, a suitable department is assigned the petition and determines its fate. The assigned ministry may convene a collaborative meeting, bringing together petitioners, officials, and other stakeholders to discuss the issue before deciding how to respond. If successful, the petition’s proposals will be fully or partially adopted; if not, the petition will be set aside for further study or rejected altogether.

Unlike other popular petition platforms, such as Change.org, Join is seen as a highly institutionalized form of digital democracy due to its accountability mechanisms and the government’s active engagement with it. Its collaborative approach has potential to effect real change and runs a lesser risk of pseudoparticipation — participation that creates the appearance of citizen influence without actually shaping government decisions.

However, even with such a collaborative approach, it can be assumed that some policy areas have greater success rates than others. To determine which policy areas have benefited most from digital democracy in Taiwan, the author of this study compiled a dataset of 262 petitions with more than 5,000 signatures. These ranged in date from Join’s inception in September 2015 to May 2022. The author also interviewed 12 citizens involved in online petitions and 14 government officials to unpack the intricacies of policymaking in response to petitions. Lastly, they supplemented their analysis with news media reports, meeting transcripts, and other publicly available documents.

For their analysis, the author categorized the petitions into four policy domains:

1. Open: A domain characterized by the emergence of new stakeholders who bring forward new, previously neglected issues;
2. Technocratic: A domain where participation largely comes from experts and officials rather than ordinary citizens;
3. Adversarial: A domain marked by ongoing conflict between government and social groups, or among social groups themselves; and
4. Collaborative: A domain where cooperation and aligned agendas between government and social groups prevail despite conflict, and where existing rather than new issues are presented and discussed.

Petition outcomes were categorized as either “policy change” or “no policy change” based on whether the petition was fully or partially adopted, or rejected. Where the outcome wasn’t explicitly stated, the author only designated it as “policy change” when the government response promised some future action.

The petitions were linked to 18 different policy areas. Of these areas, animal protection petitions had one of the highest success rates. An impressive 75% of the animal protection petitions analyzed resulted in policy changes, compared to an overall average of 38.5% across all policy areas. Only natural resource petitions were equally effective (75%), but there were just eight of these in total compared to 24 total animal protection petitions.

The author attributes this success to animal protection’s classification as a collaborative policy domain, one where government agencies and advocacy groups have, over time, come to share a broad agenda even when they disagree on the details. In domains like this, officials are often already inclined to act, and petitions tend to supply the final push rather than change anyone’s mind.

This is neatly illustrated by an animal protection petition that called for a ban on catching fertilized crabs. Existing regulations already prohibited catching fertilized crabs for a three-month period annually. Once the petition reached 5,000 signatures, the Council of Agriculture responded by extending the period to four and a half months — not the complete ban the petitioners wanted, but still an improvement. According to the person who started the petition, the Director of the Fisheries Agency already supported the proposal, but needed external pressure to actually make the change.

However, the author emphasizes that collaborative domains take time to develop. While the findings show that animal protection issues can successfully be advanced through digital democracy, it should be noted that animal activism in Taiwan has the advantage of history. Pressure from the public has been building for over 25 years, due in part to the strong mobilization efforts of animal rights groups. But even if a country is lacking a tool as collaborative as the Join platform, sustained public pressure and promotion of overlooked issues are still the most successful route to positive change. The road ahead may seem long, but persistence leads to a greater chance of being heard. And for animal activists in particular, a resistance to silence is crucial in protecting those with no voice at all.