A worlds-eye view of the United Kingdom through parliamentary e-petitions

Abstract

Gaining an understanding of the concerns and aspirations of a country’s diaspora can help domestic politicians to better connect with this community and gain their support in elections. The United Kingdom’s diaspora is large and spread among many countries, and currently has the right to vote in UK general elections only for a limited time. However, there are proposals to abolish these time limits and this will make this community of increasing interest to politicians. This study uses signatories to the UK Parliaments e-petitions platform to gain an understanding of the foreign and domestic political concerns of this community. The analysis uses Latent Dirichlet allocation to identify common topics among the e-petitions and hierarchical clustering to identify commonalities among countries, territories and regions. It is found that there are five meaningful groups of such, and they are diverse in the topics that are of most concern.