Do You Hear the People Petitioning?

The White House had a secession crisis on its hands. Citizens from Texas and eight other states had petitioned to the White House to allow these states to withdraw peacefully from the Union. While the crisis did not break up the Union, it did make famous the platform that allowed this to happen: the White House online petitioning website, “We the People”.

We the People was launched by the White House in September 2011 to allow citizens to directly petition the White House. Petitions with signatures above a given threshold number, currently set at 100,000, would get an official response from the administration.

This online petition system is part of the Obama administration’s effort to create a more responsive and transparent government. The attempt was initially met with ridicule and skepticism. An article in the Wall Street Journal mocked frivolous and wacky petitions that called, among other things, for the administration to acknowledge the existence of aliens, while wondering out loud about the glaring absence of petitions regarding serious issues such as the national budget and job creation programs.

The underlying concern was that this petition platform demonstrated the downside of democracy, where provincial concerns overshadow more pressing national concerns. The concern, however, was misplaced. A blog post from The Huffington Post argued that such is exactly the nature of petitioning: to bring new issues of concern onto the agenda of political leaders. National issues such as the economy would always be on top of the agenda, with or without petitions. But without the petition system, some important issues would have gone ignored. One petition, for example, called for the digitization of federal public records, a topic hardly at the top of the national news but nonetheless important.

Skeptics have also questioned the efficacy of such online petitioning. Critics pointed to the lack of substantive outcomes, as most of the White House responses merely reiterated the previous official stance and offered no signal of policy change. The gradual increasing of the number of signatures required to trigger a response from the initial 5,000, to 25,000, and then to 100,000, also made many suspicious of the administration’s sincerity to engage the public. While it remains to be seen if this website is more than a technological gimmick, the criteria to evaluate the merits of petitioning should go beyond whether or not petitions lead directly to policy change. Public support may be necessary but not sufficient by itself to bring about policy change. Further, many of the petitioners themselves are not pleading a case for policy change, but are making a political point: secession petitions and Obama impeachment petitions were never about leaving the Union or impeaching Obama. Alex Jones, who started a viral petition to deport CNN anchor Piers Morgan for his views in favor of gun control, had admitted that his purpose was mainly to create a spectacle.

At less than two years old, the platform is still young and growing. It now has more than 5 million registered users, 140,000 petitions, and receives an average of 807 signatures per hour. Last August, the White House made the website open source; and it has recently announced plans to launch a version 2.0 in March. The White House is dedicated to improving this project. So long as the government treats this public forum with enough sincerity and respect, this open platform could be a significant step in the evolution of public sphere in the Internet age.