Temporal dynamics of e-petitions to the UK parliament 2015-2022

The tradition of petitioning authorities for redress of grievances can be traced back in England to the 14th century and was completed at the turn of the 21st century in the UK by the introduction of online systems which have proved extremely popular. However, no diachronic study has been conducted so far to precisely appraise this popularity during the premierships of David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson between 2015 and 2022. The first objective of this paper is thus to explore data pertaining to over 100,000 petitions submitted to the UK Parliament over this period to map petition submission numbers over time, analyse the evolution of the system and probe the factors which may influence trends in submissions. The second part of the article focuses on the volume of signatures achieved by petitions and the dynamics of petition signing. The main goal is to determine whether a petition’s fate is set in the hours following its opening to the public. The analysis relies on a triangulation methodology, combining insight from data mining, data visualisation, close reading and statistics in order to build a web of evidence supporting the results being offered.