Abstract

How do citizens voice their grievances? Existing research emphasizes the importance of street protests, yet such protests are increasingly rare under restrictive environments. Rather than physically taking to the streets, mass petitioning has become a common form of resistance, emerging through collective action, imitation of others, or repeated actions by an individual. Is mass petitioning an effective strategy for claims-making? This article examines how mass petitioning influences the likelihood of eliciting state response for group demands. I argue that mass petitions are viewed unfavorably by the state because they distort public representation and undermine the state’s monitoring capacity. Using text data from over 100,000 online public complaints submitted to Chinese city governments, I employ a text-reuse detection method to identify more than 4,000 mass petition campaigns. Analyses show that local governments are indeed more likely to reject mass petitions than isolated ones. This article demonstrates how citizens exploit state-sanctioned channels to mobilize collective actions and advances understanding of state responsiveness at the local level.