Participação e deliberação : análise do impacto dos usos das novas tecnologias digitais na dinâmica dos orçamentos participativos de Belo Horizonte e Recife

Abstract

Some municipalities have adopted mechanisms of political participation and public deliberation online, as the Participatory Budget (PB) digital. Experiences that combined e-government and e-democracy, using the NTICs participation in political processes and public deliberation. A democratic innovation that fits in the contemporary trends of electronic democracy. Belo Horizonte and Recife have adopted forms of participatory budgeting by the political institutes of e-participation that have produced different impacts on traditional forms of inclusion, mobilization, participation and public deliberation. In some cases, we can observe that the deliberative process qualifies through of creation of the arenas of public deliberation online, although this is still viewed with reservations by the skeptics.The analysis of the institutional design of these arrangements online public deliberation, as well as the empirical analysis of quantitative indicators of political participation and of the deliberation through NTICs, especially the Internet, points to a possibility of extending the democratic canon, not only because of the largest numerical aggregation of individuals to the process, but also by the possibility of developing new forms of inclusion, participation, mobilization and virtual interaction that can happen by the Internet, such as emails, chats, blogs, posts, twitters and social networks (facebook, orkut etc). Moreover, it has allowed citizens a greater access to information about public management, raising social control and accountability. We try to understand why the political participation online can be seen as a mere aggregative perspective and experiences as PB digital participation can merge offline and online, creating hybrid deliberative arenas with different dynamics of mobilization and interaction. We also want to know whether these new institutions reduce the costs of the political participation creating opportunities to oxygenate the democracy. Finally, we checked if the NTICs have been used not only as tools for political consultation, facilitating communication between citizens and government officials, but as opportunities to spread democratic values through communicative flows between citizens and the state, beyond the interactivity and the horizontal multidirectional flows citizens and different interest groups present in civil society. With this purpose, we analyzed the institutional design of the participatory budget in Belo Horizonte and the digital stage of the participatory budgeting in Recife to check the impact of the use of NICTs about the political process and the quality of public deliberation. We work with some institutional dimensions of public deliberation, and participation, mobilization, interaction and social control. Thus, we verify quantitatively, from the institutional designs of the two experiments PB, the levels of quality of public deliberation produced by the introduction of forms of e-participation and e-deliberation. Finally, we conduct empirical analyzes of quantitative data and qualitative information obtained in a fieldwork, as well as analysis of the discursive content of remarks posted on the website of the Digital PB BH (2008 and 2011), through a Matrix of the Quality of Deliberation Online, on predictors such as participation, inclusiveness, providing reasons, reciprocity, mutual respect, orientation to the common good and for the mobilization.