Parliamentary Petitions: An Information Studies Perspective

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study into the views of members of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in the Thirty-seventh Parliament to parliamentary petitions as an information source. It sought to advance the understanding of parliamentary petitions in an information studies context. Research of this nature is necessary because there has been a lack of scholarly interest in parliamentary petitions to date. The study hoped to ameliorate the dearth of literature on the topic. A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather data. The unique and rich dataset generated from the survey results were used to describe how a group of parliamentarians in a Westminster-style parliament perceive parliamentary petitions. The results indicate that over half the respondents believed that petitions are an important information source. Over three quarters of respondents agreed that petitions provide a mechanism to gauge the depth of feeling on an issue in their electorate. The belief that petitions offer an effective means of communicating with constituents was proffered by almost 60 per cent of respondents. Two-thirds of respondents agreed that petitions sometimes influenced their decision-making and that the number of signatures on a petition sometimes influenced their decision-making. Petitions as an information source didn't fare very well when compared to the other parliamentary information sources available to respondents. So while petitions are deemed to be an important information source in their own right, it can be deduced from the results of this study that respondents believe that there are more effective information sources available to parliamentarians.