A worlds-eye view of the United Kingdom through parliamentary e-petitions
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221109737 |
| Author | Stephen D Clark,Nik Lomax |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221109737
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2023, Vol. 25(3) 498 –516
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481221109737
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
A worlds-eye view of the
United Kingdom through
parliamentary e-petitions
Stephen D Clark and Nik Lomax
Abstract
Gaining an understanding of the concerns and aspirations of a country’s diaspora can help
domestic politicians to better connect with this community and gain their support in elections.
The United Kingdom’s diaspora is large and spread among many countries, and currently has the
right to vote in UK general elections only for a limited time. However, there are proposals to
abolish these time limits and this will make this community of increasing interest to politicians.
This study uses signatories to the UK Parliaments e-petitions platform to gain an understanding of
the foreign and domestic political concerns of this community. The analysis uses Latent Dirichlet
allocation to identify common topics among the e-petitions and hierarchical clustering to identify
commonalities among countries, territories and regions. It is found that there are five meaningful
groups of such, and they are diverse in the topics that are of most concern.
Keywords
classification, diaspora, e-petitions, general elections, topic models, United Kingdom
The UK diaspora and engagement with Westminster
While the recent past has proved to be a challenging time for most governments, and a
traumatic time for their citizens, the UK government has been pre-occupied with both
Covid-19 and also the consequences of the Brexit referendum (Usherwood, 2021).
Having negotiated a deal with the European Union (EU) in late 2019, and having auton-
omy in international matters, the UK now needs to work out its path and role in the World
after leaving the EU (Gaskarth and Langdon, 2021).
An important aspect of the Brexit vote was the desire of UK citizens to have greater
control over immigration policy (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2017) and to be able to ‘direct’
the government to adopt certain policy changes (Wellings, 2020). What was often not
recognised is that British citizens themselves emigrate to other countries and become
immigrants. It is natural that these two aspects, immigration into the United Kingdom and
Leeds Institute for Data Analytics and School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Corresponding author:
Stephen D Clark, Leeds Institute for Data Analytics and School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds
LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: tra6sdc@leeds.ac.uk
1109737BPI0010.1177/13691481221109737The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsClark and Lomax
research-article2022
Original Article
Clark and Lomax 499
emigration to another country from the United Kingdom are linked (Weinar, 2017). UK
emigrants are likely to be of a different character to their fellow UK residents (Cranston,
2017), motivated to live abroad for many reasons, including professional opportunities
(Harvey and Beaverstock, 2016), economic prospects (Croucher, 2012), family ties
(Richardson, 2006) or for lifestyle improvements (Botterill, 2017).
The size of this UK diaspora is large, with a 2019 estimate by the United Nations
Population Division of nearly 4.3 million UK migrants resident abroad (United Nations –
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2019). This places the UK 14th on a list of
234 countries and territories ranked by the size of their diaspora, ahead of counties such
as Germany (4 million), the United States (3.2 million) and France (2.3 million).
While these citizens are not living in the United Kingdom, they are still able to have
some influence on the political journey of the United Kingdom. For democratic purposes,
UK migrants abroad are currently entitled to vote in domestic UK elections for a period
of 15 years beyond their departure from the United Kingdom. The estimate for the size of
this electorate living overseas is about 233,000 (Johnston, 2021). This may appear to be
a small number relative to the size of the diaspora quoted above, but given that the typical
size of a UK Westminster parliamentary constituency is 80k electors, this diaspora in
aggregate is the equivalent of 3 such constituencies. However, in practice, these overseas
citizens vote in their ‘home’ constituency, usually where they were last resident in the
United Kingdom and their impact will therefore be dispersed. Using data from the Office
for National Statistics (2021) shows that there is still, however, some spatial clustering of
overseas citizens in some constituencies, with the four inner London constituencies of
Hammersmith, Cities of London and Westminster, Chelsea and Fulham, and Westminster
North having an overseas electorate of 2% or more in December 2019 (in Kensington, the
Conservative majority over Labour in the December 2019 General Election was just 150
votes while the number of the overseas citizens registered to vote there is 1168).
Given this large pool of potential voters, many UK political parties are starting to
organise so as to try and capture these votes (Collard and Kernalegenn, 2019; Von Nostitz,
2021), all with varying degrees of success (Collard and Kernalegenn, 2021; Collard and
Webb, 2020). The current proposals from the UK Government are to abolish this 15-year
limit and make re-registration less cumbersome, recognising that ‘. . . decisions made in
the UK Parliament on foreign policy, defence, immigration, pensions and trade deals
directly affect British citizens who live overseas’ (Smith, 2021).
An aspect of political engagement that has come to the fore in recent years are e-peti-
tion platforms, particularly those hosted by governments and legislative bodies (Le Blanc,
2020). The United Kingdom’s Parliament has such a platform and it has enjoyed consid-
erable popularity with the population. To sign a UK Parliament e-petition the signatory
must first identify as a British citizen or UK resident (although no check is made on this
status) and provide a valid email address, to which a link is sent, that when activated
registers their signature. The signatory can also enter a UK postcode or a country of resi-
dence to identify their location. This information is not validated by the e-petitions plat-
form. The number of signatures for each e-petition in each constituency, and also each
country, is provided by the e-petition platform.
This study uses the number of signatures to e-petitions, by country of residence, which
were active during the 2017 to 2019 UK Parliament to gain an understanding of what
e-petition topics gained the most support in each country, territory or region. We are con-
cerned with three research questions:
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