What, when and where of petitions submitted to the UK government during a time of chaos

Bertie Vidgen,Taha Yasseri

doi:10.1007/s11077-020-09395-y

Bertie Vidgen, Taha Yasseri

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-020-09395-y

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Journal: Policy Sciences	Publication Date: Jul 11, 2020
Citations: 9	License type: open-access

Affiliation: University of Oxford, The Alan Turing Institute

Abstract

In times marked by political turbulence and uncertainty, as well as increasing divisiveness and hyperpartisanship, Governments need to use every tool at their disposal to understand and respond to the concerns of their citizens. We study issues raised by the UK public to the Government during 2015–2017 (surrounding the UK EU membership referendum), mining public opinion from a data set of 10,950 petitions, which contain 30.5 million signatures. We extract the main issues with a ground-up natural language processing method, latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling. We then investigate their temporal dynamics and geographic features. We show that whilst the popularity of some issues is stable across the 2 years, others are highly influenced by external events, such as the referendum in June 2016. We also study the relationship between petitions’ issues and where their signatories are geographically located. We show that some issues receive support from across the whole country, but others are far more local. We then identify six distinct clusters of constituencies based on the issues which constituents sign. Finally, we validate our approach by comparing the petitions’ issues with the top issues reported in Ipsos MORI survey data. These results show the huge power of computationally analysing petitions to understand not only what issues citizens are concerned about but also when and from where.

Highlights

Contemporary politics is marked by increasing turbulence (Margetts et al 2015), from surprise election results, such as Theresa May’s slender majority in 2017, to seismic political shifts, such as the Brexit vote in 2016, and party schisms, such as the 11-MP breakaway to Change UK in 2019
During the 2015–2017 parliament, 31,173 petitions were submitted to the UK Government, of which 10,950 petitions were accepted onto the platform
486 petitions reached the threshold for a response from the government (10,000 signatures) and, of these, 65 petitions reached the threshold for a debate by a House of Commons Select Committee (100,000 signatures)

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary politics is marked by increasing turbulence (Margetts et al 2015), from surprise election results, such as Theresa May’s slender majority in 2017, to seismic political shifts, such as the Brexit vote in 2016, and party schisms, such as the 11-MP breakaway to Change UK in 2019. No study has integrated analysis of these dynamics and considered all petitions submitted to a national government, including those which receive few signatures. Receiving a given number of signatures is lower than indicated by the fitted power law distribution.

Results

Conclusion