{"id":93593,"date":"2016-12-28T09:45:28","date_gmt":"2016-12-28T14:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2016\/12\/28\/we-the-people-five-years-of-online-petitions\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T04:18:26","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T09:18:26","slug":"we-the-people-five-years-of-online-petitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/internet\/2016\/12\/28\/we-the-people-five-years-of-online-petitions\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We the People\u2019: Five Years of Online Petitions"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Five<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: Screenshot of the \"We the People\" website.
Source: Screenshot of the “We the People” website.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/figure>\n\n
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During President Obama\u2019s first full day in office on Jan. 21, 2009, he issued a statement<\/a> committing his administration to pursue \u201can unprecedented level of openness in Government.\u201d His goal was to make the federal government more transparent, participatory and collaborative through the use of new technologies.<\/p>\n\n

The broader effort was called the Open Government Initiative<\/a>, and a key part of it took effect more than two years later when the administration created an online petitioning system called \u201cWe the People<\/a>\u201d in September 2011. The White House promised to use the site to engage with the public and to issue responses to all petitions that reached a given number of signatures within 30 days of creation. The original threshold was set at 5,000 signatures but was increased to 100,000 in later years. As Obama prepares to leave office in early 2017, the site has been active for more than five years and is one of the most prominent legacies of the open government initiative.<\/p>\n\n

In order to understand how citizens used the opportunity to directly seek redress from the White House, and how the administration responded, Pew Research Center conducted a detailed content analysis of \u201cWe the People\u201d petitions. The \u201cWe the People\u201d archive includes all petitions that received at least 150 signatures within the first 30 days of when they were posted on the site.[1. Petitions that receive fewer than 150 signatures are not archived on the site\u2019s feed of open petitions or the API. Therefore, these petitions are not available for analysis.]\u00a0The Center downloaded and examined these petitions covering the period from the site\u2019s 2011 inception through July 3, 2016. The analysis is based on a combination of publicly available data<\/a> provided by the site\u2019s API and human coding of all 4,799 publicly available petitions and 227 White House responses.<\/p>\n\n

This analysis shows that no one type of request dominated the online petition system, with users of the site instead addressing a wide range of topics. The topmost subjects included petitions pertaining to the health care system (8%); disease awareness and related issues (6%); veterans\u2019 and military issues (6%); immigration (5%); requests to honor individuals or create holidays (5%); requests to investigate criminal cases (5%); and animal rights (5%).<\/p>\n\n

In terms of whether these petitions had any impact, the study suggests there were a variety of outcomes:<\/p>\n\n