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

[Ildiko Kaposi]

Stephen,

I believe Wainer's 'delight' was ironic at best, even sarcastic -
precisely because he senses political spin behind the initiative.

The more I learn about it, the more it seems like the site is an
exercise in electronic populism. I thought the idea of
push-button/point-n-click panacea for democracy was passe, but your
government appears to think otherwise. It is hard to make predictions,
but if this is an empty exercise, devoid of deliberation or obligations
for the PM to take the petitions into consideration, it will probably
not be a lasting success with British citizens.

Ildiko Kaposi


>>> "Stephen Coleman" <S.Coleman at leeds.ac.uk> 11/18/06 10:33 AM >>>
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