Participação e deliberação na internet: um estudo de caso do orçamento participativo digital de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This study undertakes an empirical research on political participation and public deliberation of citizens in the digital platform offered by Digital Participatory Budget (DPB) in Belo Horizonte. This program was designed to encourage citys voters to choose works to be carried out in the city and it hosted in its site discursive tools such as forums, chats and comments. Regarding the concept of political participation, we present theories of the New Lefts authors of the 60s and 70s, who argued that citizens are not apathetic, but they lack greater opportunities for participating in decision making. These opportunities could offer innumerous benefits. Next, we present a brief discussion about the new participatory institutions, especially the Brazilian Participatory Budgeting, which tend to emphasize the importance of institutional design for qualified participations. In relation to public deliberation, we present Habermas model of Deliberative Democracy, giving emphasis to the importance given by the author to the sovereignty of citizens, who can influence political decisions. In second place, the author proposes a deliberation extended to all society. After that, this study aims to expand these concepts to allow and encourage other forms of communication beyond the rational one. Moreover, the objective is to demonstrate there is a whole range of authors who defend the deliberation in limited arenas. In a second step is presented part of the debate on political participation on the Internet, which has split between optimists and pessimists, but now has a more neutral state, which accepts that the Internet can not, by itself, enhance or destroy democratic values. With this premise, we seek to show there are two important issues: first, behind all projects of digital democracy there is a model of democracy, which emphasizes different values. Secondly, the way how the digital tools are developed affects the how they will be used. In a final moment, I treat the concept of online deliberation, highlighting studies on the various factors that influence its results and presenting some indicators used to assess the degree of deliberativeness of online discussions. In light of these perspectives, this dissertation aims to analyze discursive exchanges of citizens held in the online forum of DPB, using indicatives extracted from deliberative theory. Considering that the deliberation is not an isolated process, we evaluate the institutional design of the participatory program and the design of the digital tools used for participation and deliberation in DPBs site. Empirical analysis shows that the degrees of deliberativeness involving discursive exchange were low, but that citizens were concerned to justify their positions and to be respectful to each other. We present several indicators that show that low levels of deliberativeness could be explained by low sophisticated digital tools of DPBs site and by a lack of incentive for discussion by the City Hall. The high levels of deliberativeness appear to be related to the fact that the participants considered the forum as important for mobilizing other voters and also to the theme of the deliberations, which was the main explanation for some results.