This paper has been published as: Andreas Jungherr and Pascal Jürgens (2010) The Political Click: Political Participation through E-Petitions in Germany. Policy and Internet 2 (4) 131-165.
In 2005 the German Bundestag implemented an electronic petition system. Individuals were given the opportunity to send in private petitions to the German parliament via an online platform and also to submit petitions of public interest which in turn were published by the German parliament on the platform to enable other users to express their support of these public petitions through electronic co-signatures. The German Bundestag documents the co-signature lists of these public petitions on its petition platform. This enables researchers to examine typical patterns in the dynamics of e-petition support and usage patterns of the e-petition platform users. This paper, informed by the Computational Science and Digital Methods approaches attempts just that. The authors present a first exploratory overview of dynamics in e-petition support and usage patterns of e-petition platform users.
