Clark, S.D. orcid.org/0000-0003-4090-6002 and Lomax, N. orcid.org/0000-0001-9504-7570 (2023) Using e-petition data to quantify public concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic: a case study of England. Policy Studies. ISSN 0144-2872
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on society and many governments and politicians were required to make quick decisions to protect public health. In reaching these decisions they needed to weigh advice from experts in many fields and then “sell” these decisions. However little was known at the time about the desires and aspirations of their electorates. Here we identify one such source of public opinion, signatures to various COVID-19 related Parliamentary e-petitions Whilst there were over 1,500 such e-petitions, we identify 27 common and meaningful topics and show how the strength of these topics varies between individual parliamentary constituencies. Using a measure of support for each topic in the constituencies we identify five constituency groupings. There are two Conservative voting groups, “Middle England” and “Equity of Support”, the former are located largely in southern England whilst the latter are in the midlands and northern England. The groups that show strong support in Labour voting constituencies are ones around education and funding issues. This article shows how a targeted range of e-petitions can be grouped into topics and the popularity of topics established, and thereby function as a useful way of augmenting democracy and democratic institutions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | e-Petitions; COVID-19; England; topic models; classification |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Centre for Spatial Analysis & Policy (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 31 Oct 2023 15:50 |
Last Modified: | 31 Oct 2023 15:50 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/01442872.2023.2203476 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:204718 |