This paper tests whether the social information provided by the internet affects the decision to participate in politics. In a field experiment, subjects could choose to sign petitions and donate money to support causes. Participants were randomized into treatment groups that received varying information about how many other people had participated and a control group receiving no social information.

On 7 May 2009 the National Audit Office (NAO) has published a report on information exchange in benefits delivery: Department for Work and Pensions: Communicating with Customers, produced by a joint OII-LSE research team led by Professors Helen Margetts (OII) and Patrick Dunleavy (LSE).

The shift of much of political life on to the Internet and WWW has implications for understanding of political behaviour, particularly people's willingness to undertake collective action and organise around public goods. Web-based experiments are an under-used methodology to identify and investigate these Internet effects.

Economists studying commercial activity on-line argue that the most significant difference between on-line and off-line commerce is the ability of firms to ‘know who your customers are and treat them differently’ (Vulkan 2006), customizing prices and offerings. This difference comes from the huge amount of data generated by on-line transactions, in terms of historical records, usage statistics and real-time data. Yet in political life, governmental organizations and political parties have been far slower to use such data to improve their service offerings and devise innovative policy interventions, such as differential pricing and personalized information provision.