What Are Petitions Good for? Institutional Design and Democratic Functions

Abstract

Parliamentary efforts to facilitate wider participation and specialised online platforms have made petition instruments more attractive and relevant, yet comparisons of petition instruments are rare. This article examines formalised (parliamentary petitions) and non-formalised petition instruments (online petitions) in Austria via a cluster analysis of actors and content of 600 petitions between 2011 and 2018. We find that, depending on the legal and institutional design, different petition instruments serve three different democratic functions: voice in parliament, link with constituents and public mobilisation. Complementing these results with insights from expert interviews with petitioners, the article provides also an understanding of how petition instruments affect petitioners’ motivations. Our findings yield a more nuanced picture of the motivations and functions of petition instruments.

When is grassroots lobbying effective? The case of the e-petitions at the national level in the UK

“…7 The term the 'e-petition system effectiveness' was defined by Tiburcio (2015) as 'achievement of the aims/goals of e-petition systems' (p. 39). The most frequently mentioned aims include: enabling political participation (Yassari et al 2017), facilitating public mobilization (Rosenberger et al 2022), reinforcing civic mindedness (Yasseri et al 2017), providing a link between the citizens and the parliament (Hough 2012;Puschmann et al 2017;Rosenberger et al 2022), contributing to the parliamentary agenda (Matthews 2021), obtaining legitimacy for the political decisions (Leston-Bandeira 2019; Lindner and Riehm 2011;Melo and Stockemer 2014), educating the citizens about the democratic system and various social problems (Bochel and Bochel 2017), strengthening the identity of the groups and helping them recruit more members (Leston-Bandeira 2019), and influencing policies (Hough 2012;Matthews 2021;Puschmann et al 2017;Escher and Riehm 2017).…”