Post-Election Petitioning and the Cascade Effect
The article above discusses how the results of the 2012 election have prompted individuals in several states to file petitions requesting secession from the United States. Most prominent among the states represented was Texas, which managed to garner over 34,000 petition signatures, surpassing the threshold required to gain recognition from the White House. Numerous other states filed petitions as well, but none received nearly as much support. All of the petitioning was done online through the website WhiteHouse.gov.
This situation can be related to direct benefit principles and the idea of cascades. Because most of the Texas petitioning was conducted on the internet, everyone could see whether or not the petition was gaining popularity. As it started to pick up more and more followers, it is likely that an increasing number of people who held similar beliefs felt it useful to join. Hence, the petition had a direct benefit effect in the sense that the more people participated, the more it (or at least some of its ideas) would be taken seriously. It is interesting to consider whether the same petition would have gained as much popularity if it was taken to each individual privately, and individuals were asked to sign without seeing the decisions of others.
Each of the states that filed petitions can be considered as networks of nodes in which individual threshold for participation and the existence of clusters can potentially hinder the “adaptation” of the appeal. One of the reasons the petition caught on so well in Texas, for example, is because Texas consists of a majority of Romney supporters. Thus, there are fewer clusters (Obama-supporters, in this case) that prevent the ideas from spreading rapidly. Furthermore, the use of internet (as mentioned before) increases each individual’s threshold for participation because everyone is well aware that there are others who are also dissatisfied with the government.