Petitioning and People Power in Twentieth-Century Britain

20世纪的英国人请愿很多：请愿者包括反对在教室里鞭打的孩子，反对在街道上开设新超市的居民，或在全球范围内寻求废除核武器的活动家。在1999年的欧洲价值观调查中，79%的英国受访者表示他们签署了请愿书，这一比例高于1997年大选的投票率。然而，历史学家和社会科学家一直把注意力集中在选举上，把它作为政治的主要经验，而忽略了上访者向议员、国会议员、君主和几乎所有其他可以想象到的权威人物发起个人抗议的方式。该项目汇集了上访历史、公众参与政治研究和二十世纪英国社会的专家，以调查上访作为一项活动和一种制度。这使该团队能够分析大众民主的核心挑战：在一个更大、更多样化的政治社区中，直接民主、参与式民主和代议制民主应如何混合？通过确定熟悉的、可访问的请愿实践的新含义和背景，我们可以评估超越特定机构或主题的不断变化的社会关系和政治文化，作为一个分析水平。该项目的广泛年代和跨学科团队允许对从纸质请愿到电子请愿的转变进行调查，从而首次对从模拟政治到数字政治的过渡可能得到和失去的东西进行历史记录。这项研究将测试特定的竞选者在他们活动的特定阶段是如何接受或拒绝请愿的。例如，在我们这一时期开始时，我们怀疑国会上访的古老传统正在减弱，人们更倾向于向君主或政府请愿。然而，在第二次世界大战后的几十年里，活动人士在任何正式系统之外主动邀请或接受他们的请愿，将他们自己的请愿书强加给民选代表或负责当局。该项目还确定了当地的行动主义机制及其背后不断变化的技术。在我们的研究结束时，一份以纸张为基础的向八国集团领导人的禧年2000请愿书在教堂和学校中流传，就像非政府组织和苏格兰议会尝试早期的互联网请愿一样。此外，请愿活动通常为组织者提供了一种简单的方法，可以收集支持者的联系方式和个人数据，以便将来动员。该项目将探讨这种做法如何与政党和压力团体的专业化一起发展，以及他们如何逃避连续的数据保护法。这样做将通过理解我们最近的过去来澄清和质疑关于电子请愿的当代困境。通过使用来自个人、志愿团体和政府的档案记录，以及对活动人士和接受请愿者的现有和新采访，一个多学科团队能够评估20世纪英国请愿的趋势、范围和意义。在我们这一时期的后几十年里，我们可以增加定量的社会调查数据，研究向数字行动主义的转变，将上访的历史与当代电子上访的研究联系起来。调查结果将与英国立法机构、地方政府和非政府组织的从业人员分享。学术文章和专著将通过对特定签署人群体（如年轻人）、特定原因（如环保主义）和特定请愿遭遇（如提交请愿的报纸和电视图像）的案例研究，分析请愿的多样性和背景。通过探索一种广泛的政治表达形式——请愿——这个项目将揭示一个世纪以来英国公民身份的重塑和变化中代表性、自愿协会和人民主权的动态。

Twentieth-century Britons petitioned a lot: Petitioners ranged from children opposing caning in the classroom, residents resisting new supermarkets on their streets, or campaigners seeking to abolish nuclear weapons around the globe. 79% of British respondents told the 1999 European Values Survey that they had signed a petition - a higher rate than turned out to vote in the 1997 General Election. Yet historians and social scientists have focused on elections as the primary experience of politics, missing the ways in which petitioners initiated personal protests to councillors, parliamentarians, monarchs, and almost every other imaginable figure of authority. The project brings together experts in the history of petitioning, in political studies of public engagement, and in twentieth-century British society to investigate petitioning as an activity and an institution. This enables the team to analyse the core challenge of mass democracy: how should direct, participatory, and representative democracy mix in a larger, more diverse political community? By identifying new meanings and contexts for the familiar, accessible practice of petitioning, we can assess changing social relations and political cultures beyond particular institutions or themes as a level of analysis. The project's broad chronology and interdisciplinary team permit investigation of the shift from paper to e-petitioning, enabling the first historical account of what might be gained and lost in transitions from analogue to digital politics. This research will test how particular campaigners embraced - or rejected - petitions at particular points in their activities. For example, at the outset of our period we suspect that an older tradition of parliamentary petitioning was waning in favour of addresses to the monarch or the government. However, in the decades after the Second World War campaigners took the initiative outside of any formal systems inviting or receiving their petitions, forcing their own petition sheets upon elected representatives or responsible authorities. The project also identifies both the local mechanics of activism and the changing technologies behind it. By the end of our period, a paper-based Jubilee 2000 petition to G8 leaders circulated in churches and schools, just as NGOs and the Scottish Parliament experimented with early internet petitions. Moreover, petitions have often offered their organisers an easy way to harvest contact details and personal data on supporters for future mobilisation. The project will explore how this practice developed alongside the professionalisation of political parties and pressure groups, as well as how they evaded successive data protection laws. Doing so will clarify and query contemporary dilemmas about e-petitions by understanding our recent past.A multidisciplinary team is able to assess the trends, range, and meanings of petitioning in twentieth-century Britain by using archival records from individuals, voluntary groups, and the government, alongside existing and new interviews of campaigners and those receiving petitions. For the later decades of our period we can add quantitative social survey data and study the shift to digital activism, connecting the history of petitioning to contemporary research on e-petitioning. Findings will be shared with practitioners in the UK's legislatures, local government, and NGOs. Academic articles and a monograph will analyse the variety and contexts of petitioning through case studies of particular signatory groups (such as young people), particular causes (such as environmentalism), and particular encounters with petitioning (such as newspaper and television images of petitions being presented). By exploring a widespread form for political expression - petitioning - this project will reveal the dynamics of representation, voluntary association, and popular sovereignty over a century of reinvention and change in British citizenship.