O papel do cidadão nas ferramentas de Democracia Digital no Brasil: uma análise do desenho interativo das Comunidades Legislativas do Portal E-Democracia

Abstract

The increasing adoption of e-participation tools in various levels of the political sphere reinvigorates the debate about the benefits of the internet for strengthening democracies. Assuming that democratic participation is the result of a constructed citizenship in which the adoption of participative tools by politicians does not imply that the relationship between citizens and the political sphere will be enhanced, the goal of this study is to analyze the role assigned to citizens by the “Portal E-Democracia”, an initiative of the Brazilian House of Representatives. We begin with a literature review of e-democracy, e-participation and online deliberation that emphasizes the effects of participatory design on providing affordances and constraints for participation, with the goal of analyzing how the design that this participatory website constraints citizens’ engagement in decision-making processes.

Keywords

• E-Democracy
• Political Participation
• Online Deliberation