Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

People Engaging with Justice: Petitions to the Scottish Parliament

  • Published:
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

When the new Scottish Parliament was established through the Scotland Act of 1998, various innovative steps were taken to guarantee greater public participation in political processes. One of these measures, the Scottish e-petitioning system, provides a vehicle for interested citizens to petition the parliament directly on matters of public interest. This article examines all the e-petitions submitted since September 2011 in the area of Justice and Law, establishing how petitioners convey their own motivation for taking this step, and how Scottish justice is represented. Analysis of these petitions shows citizens engaging proactively with legal issues, and probes into citizens’ conceptualizations of law and justice both in their current reality and as projections of how they could or should be. It also explores the association between legal and national consciousness, and the way in which citizens adopt an increasingly transnational approach to framing legal issues. The petitions thus reveal both active concern to achieve justice in highly specific individual matters, and a more theoretical concern with the specific status of Scottish justice, portrayed as lagging behind the rest of the United Kingdom in various respects.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Adams, Nicholas, Ann Macintosh, and Jim Johnston. 2005. E-petitioning: enabling ground up participation. In Challenges of expanding internet: E-commerce, e-business, and e-government, ed. Matohisa Funabashi and Adam Grzech, 265–279. Cham: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Anduiza, Eva, Michael Jensen, and Laia Jorba (eds.). 2012. Digital media and political engagement worldwide: A comparative study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Archer, Margaret. 2000. Being human. The problem of agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  4. Barnett, Randy. 1983. The justice of restitution. American Journal of Jurisprudence 25: 117–132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Berg, Janne. 2017. The dark side of e-petitions. Exploring anonymous signatures. First Monday 22, 2. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6001/5910.

  6. Bochel, Catherine. 2012. Petitions: Different dimensions of voice and influence in the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales. Social Policy & Administration 46 (2): 142–160.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Braithwaite, John. 2004. Restorative justice and de-professionalization. The Good Society 13 (1): 28–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Breeze, Ruth. Forthcoming. Building new relationships between people and politics: Petitions in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. In Communicating with citizens in the legal field. Digitalization and Interaction, ed. Jan Engberg and Karin Luttermann. Münster: LIT Verlag.

  9. Carman, Christopher. 2014. Barriers are barriers. Asymmetric participation in the Scottish Public Petitions System. Parliamentary Affairs 67 (1): 151–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Coleman, Stephen. 2000. Parliament in the information age: The case of Westminster and Holyrood. In Reinvigorating democracy? British politics and the internet, ed. Rachel Gibson and Stephen Ward, 67–80. Aldershot: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Cotton, Ross. 2012. Political participation and e-petitioning: An analysis of the policy-making impact of the Scottish Parliament’s e-petition system. University of Central Florida Undergraduate Research Journal 6 (1): 33–44.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Dalton, Russell J. 2008. Citizenship norms and the expansion of political participation. Political Studies 56 (1): 76–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Davidson, Jenni. 2018. Sectarianism: still Scotland’s shame. Holyrood Magazine, 25 June. https://www.holyrood.com/inside-politics/view,sectarianism-still-scotlands-shame_8905.htm.

  14. Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. 1998. The common place of law: Stories from everyday life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  15. Fairclough, Norman. 2014. A critical agenda for education. In The discourse studies reader, ed. Johannes Angermuller, Dominique Maingueneau, and Ruth Wodak, 378–387. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Fairclough, Norman, Simon Pardoe, and Bron Szerszynski. 2006. Critical discourse analysis and citizenship. In Analysing citizenship talk, ed. Alfons Bora and Heiko Hausendorf, 98–123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Fox, Matthew. 2020. Legal consciousness in action: Lay people and accountability in the jury room. Qualitative Sociology 43: 111–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2018. The digital party: Political organisation and online democracy. London: Pluto.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  19. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The constitution of society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Gronlund, Åke. 2002. E-democracy and E-government: State of the Art. IFLA 68th Council and General Conference August 18–24, 1–6. Glasgow: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

  21. Johnston, Jim. 2006. Scottish Parliament e-petitioner system. eParticipation and eVoting. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eparticipation-and-evoting/.

  22. Lindner, Ralf, and Ulrich Riehm. 2009. Electronic petitions and institutional modernization. JeDEM Journal of Democracy 1 (1): 1–11.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Loft, P. 2019. Petitions in the UK. Commons Research Briefing Paper CBP 8620.

  24. Macintosh, Ann, Anna Malina, and Steve Farrell. 2002. Digital democracy through electronic petitioning. In Advances in digital government: Technology, human factors, and policy, ed. William J. McIver Jr. and Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, 137–148. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. McMahon, Michael. 2004. E-petitioning the Scottish Parliament. The Parliamentarian 85: 236–238.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Scottish Parliament. 2015. Review of the Petitions Process. Paper 859.

  27. Silbey, Susan S. 2005. After legal consciousness. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1: 323–368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Solijonov, Abdurashid. 2016. Voter turnout trends across the world. Stockholm: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

    Google Scholar 

  29. The Scottish Office. 1998. The Consultative Steering Group on the Scottish Parliament: Shaping Scotland’s Parliament. Edinburgh: The Scottish Office. https://www.parliament.scot/PublicInformationdocuments/Report_of_the_Consultative_Steering_Group.pdf.

  30. Williams, Christopher. 2009. Scottish Parliament and Plain language legal drafting. In Legal Language in Action: Translation, Terminology, Drafting and Procedural Issues, ed. S. Šarčević, 301–312. Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Globus.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Williams, Christopher. 2014. Interpersonality in legislative drafting guides and manuals: the case of the Scottish Government Publication Plain Language and Legislation. In Interpersonality in legal genres, ed. Ruth Breeze, Maurizio Gotti, and Carmen Sancho Guinda. Bern: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Zienkowski, Jan. 2017. Articulations of self and politics in activist discourse. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Cultura y Sociedad, Universidad de Navarra, Campus Universitario s/n, 31090, Pamplona, Spain

    Ruth Breeze

Authors
  1. Ruth Breeze
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ruth Breeze.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Breeze, R. People Engaging with Justice: Petitions to the Scottish Parliament. Int J Semiot Law 35, 431–454 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09730-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09730-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation