Petitions and Petitioning from the Medieval Period to the Present

Bringing together experts from eight countries and six disciplines, this research network will examine petitions from the medieval period to the present to study practices in comparison and in connection to each other. Petitions and petitioning have long been among the most important and popular forms of interaction between people and authority. These mechanisms reveal the processes underlying participation and representation across and within political cultures. As universal and ubiquitous practices, petitions have taken myriad forms and performed diverse functions, but they have typically been studied in specific chronological and geographic settings. Addressing the current context, in which e-petitions have emerged in response to falling political participation in mature democracies, provides a further pressing intellectual rationale for examining this theme now, as does the growth of digitisation projects that will transform access to petitions as sources.

As a subject, petitions cut across boundaries defined by time, space and polity, which is why this network adopts a comparative approach. To ensure a focus on a comparable group of polities, the network examines the development of petitioning within Europe and North America from the thirteenth century to the present day. Such a perspective will allow us to identify for the first time what was exceptional and generic about petitions in different national and temporal contexts, as well as how they were translated and adapted across these boundaries.

The expertise of researchers from History, Law, Literature, Communication Studies, Political Science, and Sociology will enable the network to critically examine the manifold functions of petitions and petitioning as practices across different contexts and from contrasting methodological perspectives. The network makes particular provision for early-career scholars and doctoral researchers, in order to build capacity and cross-fertilisation across academic disciplines and specialisms.

The network's three workshops will result in a new comparative history of petitioning, collaboratively authored by members of the network. Confirmed participants include researchers who have recently led major projects from the UK, USA, Europe and Australia. As such, the network will unlock further benefits from projects commissioned by a variety of funding bodies. Bringing together international researchers and projects in interdisciplinary dialogue will further the network's ambition to develop new collaborations. A key priority is catalysing new projects that will examine petitions and petitioning within even more ambitious comparative frameworks, particularly through examining these practices in global perspective.

The project has further significance in placing in broader comparative and historical perspective the rise of e-petitioning as the latest form of a practice that has been continually reinvented. To this end, the network engages public policy professionals who administer contemporary e-petitions systems and NGOs who organise e-petition campaigns. Findings will be disseminated to a wider public through working with Parliament's Education Service and digital platforms.

The three network events will answer (1) what is a petition?: how we should define petitions as distinct from other political, legal, and social engagements; (2) how has petitioning developed?: how have petitioning traditions been transformed, translated, and transmuted across time and space; and (3) why and when do petitions matter?: how petitions have shaped social and political change. A coherent multi-authored volume providing a new comparative history of petitioning is the primary output of the research network. Beyond this, the project will consolidate and direct a new generation of petitioning studies that examine distinct traditions in a wider comparative perspective and facilitate new thinking about this resurgent political practice.

A research network on petitions from the medieval period to the present is timely in informing the work of professionals developing, evaluating, or exploiting new e-petitions systems as forms of political engagement today, as well as the wider UK public. Our pathways to impact will permit the network to inform the design and use of these contemporary reinventions of petitioning.

The network directly engages those administering the UK Parliament's e-petitions system, an organisation agitating for reform of representative institutions, and a charity that uses petitions as part of issue-based campaigns. By bringing together scholars of historical and contemporary petitions with those shaping a present-day petitioning system and exploiting it, the network offers a powerful opportunity to inform current practice with a fuller understanding of the history, meaning, and dilemmas of petitioning, as well as highlighting what is new or different about e-petitions. Moreover, the comparative and methodological insights generated from our international research network will be disseminated to a wider public audience, principally through sharing our findings with the UK Parliament's education and engagement service.

The exact relationship between petitioners' requests and the authority of a sovereign institution (or, in the past, individual) remains a vexed question. Professionals re-embedding petitions within twenty-first century representative institutions should be aware of different past practices when navigating difficult decisions about petitioners' real and perceived impact on the policy-making process. Such questions informed the UK Parliament's Petitions Committee's standing orders, when it was relaunched in 2015, and ongoing reviews of these principles should be informed by historical and contemporary scholarly analysis. Offering a comparative context from diverse geographical and chronological perspectives will assist in refining the questions we ask about the role of petitioning in a modern democracy.

The network will embed policy practitioners in our academic events, bringing into our discussions the clerk to the current UK Parliament Petitions Committee, the Director of Unlock Democracy, and the Head of Research for Friends of the Earth. We have Letters of Support confirming the participation of these organisations that we can produce, if required. As well as these confirmed participants, we would seek to include more impact stakeholders, particularly from outside London (such as officials from the Scottish Parliament), and have made provision in the budget for their attendance at the final workshop. The last event of the network will conclude with a roundtable discussion from these participants, offering their reflections on the research network and their challenges to researchers for future work. Follow-up interviews will capture the long-term impact of the network's deliberations on these individuals in shaping and informing the decisions of their organisations.

A dissemination event with staff from Parliament's outreach and education service will ensure that we can share the network's findings, ultimately, with a wider public audience by informing the work of these officers. Additionally, the network will disseminate findings from the project to the public and policy-making community through digital platforms with established audiences and wide reach, such as the petitions committee's 'Petition of the Month' blog or History and Policy. While these activities and pathways to impact are concrete, the investigators also anticipate further impact activities through print and broadcast media opportunities - though these are necessarily more speculative.