How useful are political petitions?

ChastMastr

This has been on my mind for a while--years, really. How useful are political petitions? I sign the things all the time, but I feel like anyone they're going to is already on whichever "side" of the issue they're on, and I can't see how this changes things. But are they really useful?

Ruth

Which ones? Where I live people standing outside the grocery store to gather signatures are trying to put things on the state ballot, so yeah, they can be useful. The time I spent trying to gather signatures opposing the death seemed wasted at the time, in the 90s, as I never got a single one, but it was important to keep that conversation going, and there is now a gubernatorial moratorium on executions in California - the last one was in 2006.

ChastMastr

I was thinking more of online petitions that go to one’s congressman or senator or governor. (And here in Florida, well, they’re really really red…) So I send them and get a form letter email basically saying “Thank you for sending my office your petition! As you know, I support (opposite of petition’s point, couched as if it’s virtuous rather than ghastly), and I’m proud to serve the people of Florida blah blah blah…” like clockwork. But I feel like I ought to fly my flag, as it were… and (since most are from Faithful America) it does mean that the petition people can say that X number of non-right-wing Christians exist and signed it. And as well, sharing it on Facebook does send the message that not all Christians are far-right.

Gramps49

Little thing I learned from a former Congressional aid. Say you send a petition with 1,000 signatures on it, it counts as one piece of correspondence. But you send 1,000 letters with one signature on the letter, that is 1,000 pieces of correspondence. In other words, when it comes to petitioning a congressman, have 1,000 of your friends send in a letter. More effective than one petition.

Of course, it is now all email.

Telford

They have bene very useful in getting rid of members of Parliament

Baptist Trainfan

This is a very good question. Yesterday my wife and I went to an exhibition celebrating the centenary of a petition - physical, of course, and much harder to put together than an online one as many thousands of homes had to be visited and the petition explained in order to gain signatories. The petition demanded ongoing peace after WW1 and exhorted the USA to join the League of Nations. It was signed by hundreds of thousands of Welsh women and taken to America in a large box; its advocates travelled to various venues there and met with the First Lady. Did it achieve anything? Sadly not.

The exhibition also features banners from the Greenham Common protests which - unlike most demonstrations - did appear to help achieve their goal of getting the nuclear cruise missiles removed.

https://museum.wales/stfagans/whatson/12152/Petitioning-for-Peace/

Alan Cresswell

Telford wrote: »

They have bene very useful in getting rid of members of Parliament

I'm assuming that by this you're referring to the specific Recall Petitions that are enshrined in law, and organised by local authority electoral offices under the auspices of the Electoral Commission in a manner similar to a by-election. These petitions are only started under very specific circumstances - where an MP commits a crime with a custodial sentence (or suspended sentence) of less than 1y, where an MP is convicted of false expense claims, or any suspension from the House following a committee decision of more than 10 sitting days.

Beyond that very specific form of petition that very few people have an opportunity to sign, there are probably three forms of political petition in the UK that most of us are familiar with, which seem to have different effectiveness.

The first form of petition is closest to the traditional petitions of pre-internet days. Those organised by a group of people, which may be an organisation formed specifically to campaign against something, and run by that organisation. These petitions may still even be physically signed on paper, though now always supplemented by online. The effect of these petitions is almost always in the group of people turning up at their local council or even Downing Street with boxes of paper signed (and, accompanied by the media to report it), but also by coordinating efforts in other forms of campaigning - often these might be objections to a planning application, so the petitioners also encourage people to submit opinions into the planning consultation; but also writing personal letters to elected officials, marches and other forms of public protest. When a group of people put time into getting an issue raised and keeping that issue in the public eye that has power to be heard, and a petition within that context works very well - which, of course, includes a lot of sharing of the petition.

The internet has spawned several organisations that make producing petitions very easy. Many of the type of petition above are now on these platforms, but the ease of producing a petition means that many of these petitions are initiated by an individual or small group who don't follow that up with the work of promoting the petition or any of the other forms of campaigning that make petitions a part of a successful campaign. Also, these petitions being easy to start will often result in multiple versions of effectively the same petition, which dilutes the effectiveness of the petition.

Finally, the UK has a system of formal petitions to Parliament. For those that get more than 10,000 signatures this at least requires the government to respond, and over 100,000 there's a committee that then considers the petition and can put that through to debate in Parliament (which may be in committee rather than necessarily the full chamber of the Commons). This means that someone is aware of the issue, even if the responses are usually "we're not going to change anything". I'm not aware of any of the big petitions that were successful - the 6.1m who signed a petition in 2019 to revoke Article 50 were ignored, as were the 4.2m who signed a petition in 2016 (before the June 2016 public vote) calling for a threshold of 60% votes and 75% turnout for leaving the EU, a couple of petitions that between them had more than 2m signatures didn't prevent Donald Trump receiving the honours of a full state visit.

Where any petition can be most effective is when the organisations running them make a lot of political capital from the petition, and make a lot of noise about how many people signed. There's a local protest here about a development near Loch Lomond which has made a lot of noise about the campaign breaking records on number of signatures for a planning application, also "the most signatures in 48h" type of stat, along with the planning consultation. Lots of media coverage, and social media sharing of the petition and those news articles.

gustava

The 1893 women's suffrage petition in NZ was rather effective:
https://www.women.govt.nz/about-us/history-womens-suffrage-aotearoa-new-zealand

chrisstiles

They are useful to the extent that they signal political pressure.

Alan29

Like demos they can be a useful way for people to express outrage. And like most demos, that can be about the limit of their usefulness.