Do petitions actually have an affect or do they do just express that people want change?
In: Other
The big question is who are you petitioning and why…
The purpose of a petition is mainly to demonstrate that a significant amount of people agree with a viewpoint. So there is nothing stopping you petitioning for absolutely any cause you wish – want to create a petition because you feel the flag on the United States should be changed to green, yellow and purple? Feel free… Petition McDonald’s because you want them to change the shape of their burgers to triangles? Sure…
I think it is fairly obvious however that both of those petitions would fall on deaf ears, and however many votes you get they are probably going to be ignored by the people in control of the relevant areas.
At the same time there are many places where petitions can be forces for good. Petitioning for a suitable topic and demonstrating to the appropriate people that you have significant support for your cause can be a great way to help your cause – a local council organising their budget may very well take interest and consider your requests if you can show that a lot of people also agree that a new play park would be a good use of their budget, or that you think they shouldn’t be cutting funding for libraries or a whole host of other topics.
As a great example the UK has an official website based on this – anyone is free to suggest a topic/cause and publicise it, and if it gets more than a set amount of votes it will be officially considered.
So will every petition be useful? Absolutely not, but they can be a very good way of demonstrating to people how much people there are in support of a particular idea.
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