Thank you. I've had an issue with the White House petitions since it's inception, and could put my finger on exactly why. And this absolutely articulates my thoughts.

I wonder if experiments have been done on this.

Limit it to the actions of doing nothing, of clicking/signing a petition, and writing a representative.

So, the question is if the likelihood of someone writing a representative is increased or decreased by the presence of an opportunity to click/sign a petition.

Sounds like the hypothesis here is that the satisfaction of signing a petition would reduce the odds of writing a representative, more than increase it. I could see it the other way though - maybe the civic engagement of caring enough to sign a petition would make it more likely that they'd contact a representative than they would have otherwise.

I wonder how the experiment could be structured? Maybe an educational/awareness web page, with a second step of an opportunity to contact a representative, while inserting the "sign-a-petition?" step in between?

There are some ecommerce people that believe that by giving buyers more-and-smaller steps to click through, it increases conversion, so who knows.

If I had a botnet, I'd point the whole lot of them at this comment to get it upvoted more.

I don't think it's obvious that someone who clicks on a petition either would have otherwise sent a letter to a representative or would be discouraged from doing so in the future after the fact. Maybe engaging in small scale participatory democracy actually encourages people to engage in larger scales, for all you know.

Frankly, I hear so much of this "oh that'll never do anything and it just makes people disillusioned" nonsense about ALL levels of engagement ("protesters are hurting their own cause!" "it's just a staffer who reads your letter!" "no one cares what you say!") that I'm extremely skeptical of all such claims.

Maybe rather than tell people who engage that they're failing it would be more useful to encourage them to succeed more.