Petition, Signature, and Response Data from "We the People"

On September 22, 2011, the White House launched "We the People" (petitions.whitehouse.gov), a site where people could create and sign petitions asking the president and his administration to do (or not do) various things. During the Obama administration, petitions that received over a certain number of signatures generally received a response from the White House. The Obama administration released bulk SQL dumps of the petition, signature, and response data periodically (generally quarterly). Three of those bulk SQL dumps are archived here.The site remained live under the Trump administration, although the SQL dumps were no longer released. A project at Grinnell College collected data from the "We the People" API nightly and loaded it into a searchable online database (https://dasil.sites.grinnell.edu/political-science/we-the-people-data-explorer/). A bulk SQL dump of that database is also archived here. It contains essentially all petition, signature, and response data from the site's launch until it was discontinued by the Biden administration on January 20, 2021. Some data may be missing from the middle of the day on January 20, 2017. The data ends at approximately 1:45am EST on January 20, 2021. Additional information about the data can be found here: https://petitions.trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/developers/get-code