The Use Of ICT In Public Decision-Making Participation

This paper investigates social representations in processes of public decision-making participation where information and communication technologies (ICT) have played a role. The City Hall of Belo Horizonte, a Brazilian municipality, decided to use web-based technologies for the first time in 2006, creating a project called digital participative budget (DPB), whose purpose was to allow citizens to participate in prioritizing public works to be implemented in the next two years. The project was repeated in 2008 and 2011, but, intriguingly, citizen participation decreased. This study seeks to understand why popular participation has decreased over time despite the use of ICT to help connect citizens to the process. The theoretical approach is based on social representations theory (STR) and the methodology on critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 101 texts – 60 selected from the press and 41 signed by public organizations or governmental representatives. The results suggest that current political strategies, like those deployed in the Brazilian case, are not fully exploiting the potential for social interaction and collective construction offered by the Internet. The prevalence of processes of anchoring new practices in voting results mainly in its trivialization and reification, helping to outline reasons for the decrease in citizens’ participation.