Petitioning Europe

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<p>The practice of petitions goes back hundreds of years. Nowadays, with the spread of Information and Communication Technologies, a new practice has come into force, consisting of aligning the practice of petitions and the use of Internet technologies. Some institutions – at local, national and transnational level – decided to invest in the development of e-governance and are actively promoting e-participation tools. Between these tools the e-petitioner – a new instrument to help citizens interact with institutions, to make their voice heard, and hopefully, to take part in the policy making process – is ready to submit petitions online. The models of online petitions existing today can be distinguished in three models: “mailbox” (allowing the submission of petitions, as in an electronic mailbox); “town square” (allowing the participation to discussion forums) and the “parliamentary audition” (allowing a “government response”). The Scottish Parliament was the first, in Europe, to try e-petitioning: after a trial petition, in 2004 the e-Petitioner planned by the ITC of Napier University was officially launched. After this, two British local authorities, Royal Borough of Kingston and Bristol City Council , piloted a new e-petitioning system in 2005. One year later, the British Prime Minister decided to implement its own tool to submit online petitions. The new e-petitioner was launched November 2006 Four months later, a petition against the street costs registered 1,8 million of online signatures. Today there are various supports submitting e-petitions such as the German Bundestag’s e-petitioner , the Rumanian Parliament’s one and the e-petitioning system implemented by 14 Norwegian municipalities involved in a national plan aimed at increasing citizens’ influence between the elections. The European institutions also offer citizens the opportunity to send online petitions. This initiative fit with all the recent activities to promote e-participation and bidirectional communication with citizens thanks to ICT development. Today Europeans willing to submit a petition to Brussels can fill in an electronical form on the European Parliament e-petitioner . Since the first e-petitioners were implemented, researchers have been studying the use and the outcome of online. But in the treatment of e-petitions one cannot forget the ground-up aspect, or rather the mass of petitions – “formal” and “informal” – that are born and developed on web with the support of non-governmental websites that allowfor the collection of signatures. This phenomenon has a wide dimension, with one of the main websites that so far has collected 58 million one-click signatures supporting the various petitions. Some petitions are effectively sent to the governmental organs designed to receive them: this way, they become “formal”, legal instruments available to citizens. Others are sent by petitioners to specific targets that do not have any legal obligation to take position: therefore these petitions can be seen as an instrument of campaigning, communication and visibility. Thus, it is necessary that today e-petitioning analysis – from the Scottish e-petitioner to Petitiononline, from Bundestag to Pledgbank – refers to a wider online dimension. According to this view, in my PhD research I explore the existing e-petitioning tools and the literature on e-petitions. An overview on different e-petitioning research methods is offered, flowing into a new definition of online petitions. I suggest that the analysis of online petitioning includes any petition using the formal e-petitioning channel provided by the EP, as well as both informal e-petitioning channels chosen bottom-up and traditional petitioning channels with a strong online component. Thus, the object of the the research becomes the concrete citizens’ use of e-petitions as an instrument to be part of the policy-making. The aim is to study formal e-petitioners and informal citizens’ practices, focusing on the effective role of ICT in improving political participation through online petitioning. My empirical analysis focuses on the e-petitioning to the EU. The relationship between the EU and its citizens is experiencing since ever problems related with the institutional deficit of legitimacy ans insufficient democratic participation. An obvious demonstration of it was the Maastricht Treaty, the first one to introduce the notion of &quot;European citizenship&quot; and, despite that, hardly ratified by referenda. Such a situation induced Brussels to explore in a more concrete way the opportunities &quot;to approach the institutions to the population&quot; and to create a “citizens' Europe&quot;: a top-down process, at a first stage, elaborated in the European buildings. Later on – aiming at increasing the citizenship involvement, fundamental fore a more political integration - the EU decided to develop new strategies: not only of promoting Europe but also, and above all, listening to citizens. On this matter, the new ICT came into force, as the only instruments that could allow the development of consultations, forum, chats... as well as online petitions. Article 149 of the EC Treaty sanctions that any citizen can exercise the right to submit a petition to the EP; and the Constitution (art. I-47) gives citizens - one million and at least coming from more than one member State - the right of initiative, therefore inviting the Commission to act. A path, it seems, towards a greater democratic participation in the Union. But what is the truth? Do citizens submit petitions indeed? At a national or a European level? And the institutions, surrounded by lobbyists, do take into real consideration the population demandings? The analysis of 20 case-studies - petitions submitted by European citizens, such as the defense of turtles or a more efficient 112 European emergency number - offers a view over the e-petitioning use in Europe, a possible instrument to implement the democratic participation in the EU-27.</p>

• Santucci, Daria

• European

• Campaigning
• Community building / Collaborative Environments
• Consultation
• Information Provision