Petition Follows Actors? Off- And Online Petitioning in Austria

Offline and online petitions arouse interest by politicians and civil society alike (Riehm et al 2013, Halpin 2018). Thereby, petitions take various forms and range from institutionalized ones initiated by Members of Parliament to non-institutionalized ones launched and endorsed on online platforms. There is, however, little research whether and why political actors use certain types of petitions, which are characterized by different degrees of institutionalization. For the case of Austria, we gathered a dataset for two types of petitions: a) non-institutionalized online petitions (OPs) and b) Parliamentary Petitions/ Citizens’ Initiatives (PCIs) over the period 2013 to 2018 (n=409). We draw upon interactive online platforms and the database of the Austrian parliament, from which we identified proponents as well as claims (policy area, addressee, reform vs. maintaining status quo). We complement the quantitative findings with qualitative insights from interviews conducted with proponents, representing political elites and civil society in order to explore their motivations and strategies in using non-institutionalized as well as institutionalized instruments. Preliminary findings indicate a twist of petition types and proponents: On the one hand, political authorities strive for non-institutionalized instruments to communicate their agenda, although they have the full range of representative opportunities at their disposal. They initiate protest-oriented OPs criticizing (federal) government decisions. Moreover, they use PCIs to strengthen their linkage to their constituencies. On the other hand, civil society actors utilize institutionalized tools to introduce their proposals even though these instruments are more time-consuming and resource-intensive than informal ones; they initiate PCIs to raise issues, which political elites did not deal with at the time. By using these instruments, civil society actors address the parliament directly and thus get a voice in key institutions of decision-making. Based on these findings, we argue a shift, respectively an expansion of political arenas: political elites use OPs to join a protest arena and mobilize beyond representative channels. In contrast, civil society actors use PCIs to enter institutionalized politics and voice their claims in parliament. In this vein, the salience of petitions can be understood by taking into consideration social movement strategies and party activism alike. Hence, the paper aims to understand how and why representative actors and civil society turn to different petition types. Thus, we contribute to research on petitioning trends regarding actors and to scholarship on relations between social movement activities and party/governmental activism (Caiani/della Porta 2010, Verhoeven/Duyvendak 2017, Hadj Abdou/Rosenberger 2019).