In 2005, Germany's Bundestag launched what many saw as a daring innovation in that country's political process. The Parliament approved an e-petition system in which citizens could submit, sign, and discuss petitions on the Internet. Not only that, but petitioners who gathered 50,000 signatures or more now had the right to public meetings with the Bundestag's petitions committee about the laws they sought to change.

Germans had been able to submit petitions prior to 2005, of course. But the online feature and public meeting requirement were new. Did this radically change German politics? Not a whole lot, say two German scholars in a research paper commissioned by the Bundestag.

"Instead of fulfilling the hopes of those who had sought to attract the politically disengaged by offering an online channel for petitioning, the results for the most part support the expectations of political sociology's well-established standard model of political participation," Ralf Lindner and Ulrich Riehm write in a recent edition of Policy & Internet.

The researchers compared the e-petition cohort with earlier generations of petition submitters. "The share of women, petitioners with formal educational degrees below college/university level, the unemployed, and people with disabilities among presenters of public e-petitions is even lower than is already the case within the group of traditional petitioners," they note.

In other words, it is the already politically engaged who tend to embrace these sort of tools, not the disengaged. But the study did find some significant and positive differences.

Considerably younger

First, e-petitioners tend to be "considerably younger" than the usual petition signers. Almost a third of the new group are from 20 to 39 years of age. Only 13.2 percent of traditional petitioners fell into this age range. And e-petition folk tend to have even higher levels of education than paper petitioners, who already were pretty educated, compared to the rest of the population.

Second, although the number of e-petitions haven't risen that much compared to paper petitions, the number of people who sign them has notably grown. There were 16,766 petitions submitted in 2006 and 18,861 in 2009. But the volume of e-signers has jumped from 443,048 to over one million, respectively.

Third, more e-petitioners tend to belong to political parties, trade unions, trade associations, and participate in public events than traditional petitioners.

No pronounced shift

Have these demographic shifts in petitioning changed German politics? Have specific issues come to the fore as a result of the activity? Not surprisingly, Internet petitioners tend to be concerned about Internet-related issues.

From 2006 through 2009, the Bundestag petition committee held 11 public events addressing the concerns of 81 petitions. These included a petition protesting Internet censorship, a petition asking that midwives be paid better wages, and a petition opposed to a ban on violent computer games.

But "an admittedly rough and rather piecemeal review of the topics raised by public e-petitions provides no indication of a pronounced shift in issues and topics," the authors note.