This collection contains total number of signatures to 8328 petitions over time (daily resolution) along with petition metadata (title, category, time of creation), directly crawled from the website. Please see 'Related resources' section below for related data collections. This project aims to develop methodologies to study online political behaviour including use of the Internet to generate new data and experiments; to collect and analyse data on internet-mediated interactions at both individual and organisational levels; and to use this data to re-examine and where necessary develop political science knowledge and theory in light of widespread use of the Internet First, the project will re-examine the logic of collective action, assessing the impact of reduced communication and coordination costs; the changing nature of leadership; and the effects of different information environments on propensity to participate in political mobilisation. This part of the research will involve conducting laboratory and field experiments into online behaviour. Second, the research will develop the Digital-era Governance model for newer 'Web 2.0' applications and other technological developments such as cloud computing. The research will re-examine the nature of citizen-government interactions in this changing environment, examining the impact of Internet-based mediation on information exchange, organisational forms in government and citizen participation in policy-making. This part of the research will involve a comparison of government's online presence in eight countries, using webmetric techniques, and in-depth qualitative analysis of governance models, using elite interviewing and documentary analysis.

Using a webscraping approach, the UK Government’s petition website was accessed daily from 2 February 2009 until 4 April 2011, when the site closed, with an automated script to record the overall signatures to date on each active petition. Please see our publication for further details.