The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation.

The digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage was passed in Finland in 2014. Activists produced the draft text of the law on digital collaboration platforms, and support for the law was petitioned using strong digital identification. This article analyzes how the campaign for the Equal Marriage Law used new digital tools and created practices that affect democratic citizenship and power making. The campaigners succeeded in introducing to the national political debate the idea of a bill that had been twice rejected in the political process. This article introduces the typology of the mediating citizen to describe civic action that is able to affect representative politics in a constructive way and reprogram power. The radical legal framework, the Citizens' Initiative Act, offered a channel to pursue meaningful civic agency in Finland and counter the legitimacy crisis of representative democracies. In future efforts for enhancing digital civic participation such a channel for real impact should be part of the design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]