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Fighting democratic decline through parliamentary communications: the case study of the UK Parliament

In the latest blog from our Legislatures in Uncertain Times conference, Anikka Weerasinghe and Graeme Ramshaw discuss the work of communications professionals within the UK Parliament. 

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Blog

How Twitter conversations highlight the different purposes of petitioning

By Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Viktoria Spaiser

Hashtag conversations over Twitter are common place. They are used to comment on TV programmes, conferences, general themes and now petitions. The new Petitions Committee of the House of Commons has been using hashtags to support the development of discussions associated with the themes of the petitions being debated in parliament. Are these discussions on Twitter just a lot of hot air, come and gone, or can they help us understand the different purposes of petitioning? In this blog piece, we find that, instead of just noise, these Twitter discussions help to identify themes linked to petitions, different levels of sentiment associated to petitions, varying levels of polarisation, but also those petitions that despite achieving very high numbers of signatures, actually have little traction.

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Blogs

We publish blogs on parliaments or legislatures each week, and always welcome new posts addressing topical issues or sharing new research. We also welcome blog posts or ideas from practitioners working within a parliament or legislature (for example, the inside look at the House of Lords Library by Matthew Purvis). Our blog includes posts on legislatures from across the globe, at national, sub-national and supra-national levels of governance.

We are very keen to increase the diversity of contributions to our blog, in particular, the number of blogs we publish from women, or people of colour. Blog submissions from early career researchers are also especially welcome.

If you have an idea for a blog and would like to discuss it further, please get in touch with our blog editor, Gavin Hart, at: g.hart@hud.ac.uk

We also publish overviews of national parliaments. Check out our current list, and contact us if you would like to contribute.

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If you’re on Twitter, you’ll know that we have a twitter account: @psa_parl. We are always happy to tweet/retweet news about our members’ work with parliament, so do copy us in, or use the hashtag #PSAParliaments, which we check regularly.

We welcome members tweeting from our own account for a day to cover specific events. If you (or one of your students) would like to cover a specific event through our Twitter account for a day, please get in touch with us. A few ideas: State Opening of Parliament, the new devolved legislatures, Prime Minister’s Questions, a specific select committee hearing, a specific debate/vote, a conference/workshop on parliaments and legislatures, etc., etc. – it’s whatever you would like to cover as long as it is relevant to the study and understanding of parliament(s). If you want to do this, please get in touch with us!