[Air-l] Petition Tony Blair, online that is

[Stephen Coleman]

I don't share Wainer Lusoli's apparent delight at the arrival of the Ten Downing Street e-petitions tool. From a political perspective, one might ask why citizens are being urged to petition the Prime Minister, when the UK's system of government is not presidential, but parliamentary. More significantly, this technology has been built so that people are only allowed to sign petitions, but not discuss them. Unlike the Scottish Parliament's e-petitions, public deliberation is prohibited. This leads to a narrow notion of democracy without discussion in which petitions can claim neither representative nor deliberative legitimacy. >From the perspective of internet research, this is an interesting illustration of how political design can undermine technical potential. 
 
Contrast this with the great tradition of political petitioning that has existed in Britain since the late thirteenth century. The Chartists of the mid-nineteenth-century  did not make a political impact by collecting signatures, but by holding mass meetings to discuss the cause of their petition. Imagine iif the Chartists - or the disarmament movement of the 1960s - had been allowed only to plead with the Prime Minister rather than assemble, deliberate and develop their own convictions. 
 
Citizens sending petitions via this new e-tool should be encouraged to subvert its intended restrictive use by setting up an alternative web space in which propositions can be openly discussed and revised. 
 
Stephen Coleman,
Professor of Political Communication,
Institute of Communications Studies,
University of Leeds