Success factors of electronic petitions at Russian public initiative project: The role of informativeness, topic and lexical information

Abstract

Online petitions are usually regarded as one of the most popular channels to involve citizens in the political process. In our paper we have analyzed texts and voting data (pro and against) from 9705 e-petitions submitted from 2013 until 2017 at Russian Public Initiative project. Analysis of dynamics showed stabilization of interest to this resource (emergence of a new authors, growth of “strong” petitions etc.). Studying success factors of electronic petitions at the Russian public initiative project we found out that the topic and lexical information are significant factors, as well as the level of petitions.