Digital democracy. How petitions to the president work when citizens demand to veto a law

How we researched: public data, automation and artificial intelligence tools

For this study, we worked exclusively with open and publicly available data from the official website of the President of Ukraine’s electronic petitions – petition.president.gov.ua. It is on this platform that Ukrainian citizens have the opportunity to create petitions, support the initiatives of others, and receive official responses from the Head of State.

The following elements were included in the analysis:

texts of petitions;
dates of their publication;
number of votes;
status of consideration;
presence or absence of a response from the President;
a list of persons who supported the petition, indicating the date of signature.

Information processing

Given the large amount of material – more than 15,000 petitions and tens of thousands of signatures – we organised an automated data processing process. It consisted of sequentially reviewing the pages of the petitions, including the sections containing the full texts of the appeals and lists of signatories.

Artificial intelligence tools were used to speed up the analysis. They allowed us to

identify key words and wording related to the demand to veto the law;
to classify the petitions thematically;
structure and organise the collected data for further analysis.

All the information was organised in a convenient format (tables, JSON files, Excel), which made it possible to carry out in-depth and systematic analytical processing.

Selection of relevant petitions. The main purpose of the study was to find out how the mechanism of electronic petitions works in situations where citizens demand to veto a law passed by the parliament. For this purpose, a sample of petitions was formed that contained the following key wording:

“veto”
“not to sign the law”;
“veto the law”;
“block the law”;
and other similar expressions.

This approach allowed us to focus on appeals that directly relate to the exercise of the constitutional right of the President of Ukraine to veto.

Objects of analysis

After structuring the data, we carried out

analysis of the dynamics of signature collection for each selected petition;
comparison of the dates of petition submission with the 15 calendar days period stipulated by the Constitution for the President to sign or veto a law;
checking how many veto petitions reached the threshold of 25,000 signatures;
assessing the number of petitions to which an official response was provided, as well as those cases in which the citizens’ demands were satisfied through the use of the veto.

Methodological basis

The research methodology was based on a combination of the following approaches:

open data analysis;
consistent review of public information on the state web portal;
use of automation elements to process large amounts of information;
application of artificial intelligence tools for thematic filtering and text analysis;
content analysis of petition texts;
quantitative analytics to assess the effectiveness of the digital petition tool.

This approach allowed us not only to form a complete picture of civic activity, but also to assess the practical effectiveness of electronic petitions as a tool for influencing government decisions, especially at critical points in the legislative process.

The study covers the period from the moment the petitions were created until 17 March 2025.

The research was conducted by: Centre for Innovations Development in cooperation with the NGO “Golka” .