This month, we are putting a spotlight on an article by IPEN member Iris Simón-Astudillo (Universidad de Valladolid) and Irene López-Alonso (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), published in Index Comunicación in July.
Petitions to the Senate: A Participatory Tool to Address Social Concerns? explores citizen participation through the lens of petitions in Spain and the extent to which they reflect public priorities.
For decades, political disaffection has been a common feature of society since citizens do not feel represented by those who govern them, which can lead to them abstaining from participating in political life.
To address this issue, Simón-Astudillo and López-Alonso decided to examine whether the problems identified by the Spanish population in the surveys undertaken by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) are related to the petitions they request to the Senate.
The researchers analysed sixty surveys and all the petitions sent to the Upper House over the course of seven full legislatures (2004-2023).
No correlation was found between the concerns of the population and the petitions submitted to the Senate. The latter do not refer to problems affecting the general population, but rather address personal and individual issues.
This led the researchers to conclude that citizens do not have sufficient knowledge to use this channel of participation appropriately, in addition to the fact that institutions do not promote it. With the distancing between representatives and represented, the population has reached a point of disconnection with institutions in which they do not feel they can have an influence.
Petitions to the Senate: A Participatory Tool to Address Social Concerns? by Iris Simón-Astudillo and Irene López-Alonso was published in Index Comunicación (nº 15 (2), pages 275-298) on 15 July 2025.
The article can be found here via open access. A link is also available in this post in IPEN’s MS Teams space, in addition to links to two other research articles by Iris Simón-Astudillo.
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Plenary hall of the new building of the Senate of Spain. Photo by Rastrojo. Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
17 October 2025