Solve the Brexit Mess: A Discourse and Genre Analysis of UK Online Petitions on the British Withdrawal from the EU

Popular petitioning has long been used as a form of direct and democratic political participation in which, by collecting a significant number of signatures, advocates acquire the power to express a collective need to a higher authority - generally government agencies and business organisations - and request policy changes. The contemporary crisis of representative democracy, the increased availability of the Internet and its growing interactivity have led to the emergence of new forms of civic engagement, as the cyberspace can nowadays be used to sensitise and mobilise online communities. In particular, e-petition websites have brought into our time the centuries-old right to petition the rulers. Change.org is one of the most popular petition sites, where anyone can start an online campaign addressing decision-makers to drive solutions to local, national, and global problems. Research on both paper and online petitions has regarded them as instances of persuasive writing and as a hybrid genre combining, e.g., features of legal case, political propaganda, and fundraising letter. Several previous studies on e-petitions have focused on the factors - including linguistic and semantic features - which influence their popularity. E-petition texts are seen as supposedly constructed with the aim of enhancing endorsement by other citizens through a series of persuasive discursive strategies, e.g. by suggesting the need for urgent action, by exploiting emotional appeals, by stressing the credibility of the author and by providing detailed supporting data. The British decision to withdraw from the European Union represents one of the most debated and controversial issues in today’s political landscape. Decided through a referendum - a further mechanism of direct political participation -, Brexit is currently being negotiated and is causing second thoughts and concerns about its consequences. Although petitions are often criticised for their limited, if any, impact on politics, they still represent a highly valuable democratic tool as they contribute to raising public awareness on social issues, setting agendas, and starting new debates. A petition on the UK Government and Parliament Petitions website which called on the government to stop Brexit has even become the most popular and probably the biggest official petition in British history. Nevertheless, the government ruled out cancelling Brexit and rejected a previous petition for a second referendum. The present study analyses a corpus collecting a selection of online petitions supporting positions in favour and against Brexit published on the British version of Change.org. The study focuses on the persuasive strategies and motifs exploited in the user-generated discourse of e-petitions to gain support for the cause presented. In particular, the investigation analyses the way e-petitioners raise public awareness about the pros and cons of Brexit and appeal to the citizens’ civic sense and responsibility. The corpus is also examined from a genre analysis viewpoint to uncover the recurring rhetorical structures used in the texts.