Taking part
grassroots advocacy
Organizing ordinary people to contact officials themselves. Astroturf is the imitation: a campaign made to look grassroots while funded and run from the top.
In full
Genuine grassroots pressure carries weight because officials read it as constituent sentiment. Astroturfing exploits that by manufacturing the appearance of it, sometimes with fabricated identities on rulemaking dockets. Agencies and offices increasingly screen for duplicate and generated comments, and identical text is heavily discounted.
Also written as: astroturfing
Where to go next
Keep going
Browse every term in the glossary, or see the vocabulary in motion in the How government works walkthroughs.
A plain-language explanation for civic education, not legal advice. When in doubt, the official source named above controls.