Involving the Public
Parliament, Petitioning, and the Language of Interest, 1688–1720
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10063462 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philip Loft (0000-0003-1865-2624, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-23 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of British Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/jbr.2015.176 |
| OpenAlex | W2286172295 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 22 |
This article examines the nature of petitioning to the Westminster Parliament from the beginnings of the “rage of party” to the establishment of the whig oligarchy. It uses the largely unused archive of the House of Lords, which survived the parliamentary fire in 1834, to provide systematic evidence of public subscription to petitions produced in response to legislation. A total of 330 “large responsive petitions,” signed by fifty-six thousand people, were presented to the Lords between 1688 and 1720. This enabled a wide range of social and geographical groups to lobby Parliament. Parliamentarians actively sought to direct the public into voicing opinion through petitioning on matters of policy. The intervention of the language of “interest” from the mid-seventeenth century helped to legitimize and control public involvement in politics in the eyes of elites, and offered an alternative to political mobilization based on party allegiances and conceptions of society organized by ranks or sorts. The participation of the public through a regulated process of petitioning ensured that the whig oligarchy was porous and open to negotiation, despite the passage of the Septennial Act and declining party and electoral strife after 1716
Democracy · Legislation · Negotiation · Oligarchy · Parliament · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public opinion · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law · Public Administration · Scottish History and National Identity
The Politics of Petitioning
The problem with early-modern petitions
Introduction
A Microhistory of British Antislavery Petitioning
The Contested Right of Public Meeting in England from the Bill of Rights to the Public Order Acts
The Biopolitics of Manning the Royal Navy in Late Stuart England
Colonial Petitions, Colonial Petitioners, and the Imperial Parliament, ca. 1780–1918
Women, Politics, and the 1723 Oaths of Allegiance to George I
The culture of local xenophobia
The Failure of William Pitt's Irish Trade Propositions 1785
Provincal Influence on General Legislation
The Local Acts of a National Parliament
The Clash of Interests
Petitions, Gravamina and the early modern state
The East India Trade, The Politicians, and the Constitution
Making Contact
Constitutional Change in E ngland and the Diffusion of Regulatory Initiative, 1660–1714
Public Petitioning and Parliament Before 1832
The Rose Case Reconsidered
Press and Parliament in the Revolution of 1689
Patterns of parliamentary legislation, 1660–1800
London's ‘Monster’ Petition of 1680
Political Arithmetic and the English Land Tax in the Reign of William Iii
John Locke and Post-Revolutionary Politics
Popular Politics in Unreformed England
Rethinking the Public Sphere
Petitions and the 'Invention' of Public Opinion in the English Revolution
| Citations per year | 0.8 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2016 - 2022 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |