Investigating success factors for crowdfunding in politics and civic projects

Abstract

Citizen participation has become the core idea of government 2.0 in which citizens are actively involved in public issues of governance and decision-making. Additionally, the presence of digital technologies and the internet are now encouraging new forms of citizen participation to emerge. Among these new forms, we are now familiar with concepts such as e-petition, e-voting, and crowdfunding.

This dissertation focuses on two types of crowdfunding application, which emerges as an innovation in the citizen participation context. First, the rising trends of politicians who flock into the crowd to gather campaign fund bring our focus to crowdfunding for politics. Second, the presence of government who take part in crowdfunding projects to support the development of civic projects proposed by citizens, bring our attention to crowdfunding for civic projects. Although the two trends exist, there are not many studies available that explore these two phenomena.

Our first study is designed to examine crowdfunding for politics. By employing the civic voluntarism model and cognitive dissonance theory, this study develops an integrated model to explain people’s intention to participate in online political crowdfunding. Moreover, it examines how citizens see themselves with the politician and how they see the current political situation. The results show that perceived congruence between politicians and individuals is one of the most influential driving factors for online political crowdfunding participation. The findings further reveal that perceived congruence is lowered by individuals’ negative perception of the political situation.

The second study in chapter 3 explores crowdfunding in the form of civic crowdfunding. With the primary objective to understand citizens motivation to engage in civic projects through crowdfunding, this part of the dissertation examines the role of corruption perception, psychological distance toward the project and the role of trust in behavioral intention. Our integrated model is designed to test the robustness of the civic voluntarism model outside the political context. The result shows that in the context of crowdfunding for civic projects, the civic voluntarism model can explain more than 50% of people’s behavioral intention. Moreover, two main determinants that can explain people’s intention to participate are the perceived social distance and community engagement. Unlike previous research in crowdfunding, one out of two type of trust within the second study is not significant in people’s behavioral intention to crowdfund.

This dissertation contributes to both theoretical and practical implications by highlighting the potential of crowdfunding to disrupt the citizen participation area. Both studies emphasize the importance of congruence as a motivating factor in crowdfunding. A high congruence between donors and project owners, portrayed as politicians, on study 1 and higher congruence between donors and project characteristic, portrayed as social and spatial proximity, on study 2, can trigger citizen to participate in crowdfunding. In addition, both studies extend and test the civic voluntarism model in the crowdfunding context and found that different type of crowdfunding exercised different essential factors that contribute to citizens’ intention to participate.