Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action
This research addresses the problem of why most online mobilizations fail, offering insights for social scientists and organizers, though it is incremental in applying existing threshold models to new experimental data.
The study investigated the role of personality traits in online collective action success, finding that extraversion and internal locus of control are significantly associated with willingness to start mobilizations, while agreeableness is linked to following, and rounds lacking sufficient extraversion are unlikely to be funded.
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.