دانلود رایگان مقاله مفهوم سازی برای کاهش مشارکت الکترونیک شهروند

Abstract

This paper investigates the development of an electronic platform by a local government with the goal of increasing citizens' participation in public decision-making process, particularly the modality known as participatory budgeting. The local government of Belo Horizonte, a Brazilian municipality, decided to use web-based technologies to create a project called digital participatory budgeting (DPB), whose purpose was to include new segments of the population –particularly the middle class and youth – in the process of prioritizing the allocation of investments in the city's public works. The project was launched in 2006 and repeated in 2008 and 2011. Intriguingly, however, citizen participation decreased significantly. This study seeks to understand why citizens' participation decreased over time, despite the availability of a cutting-edge, user-friendly and iterative web-based platform to help connect citizens to the process. The theoretical approach is based on social representation theory (SRT) and the methodology of critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 101 documents and 19 interviews. This combination of SRT and CDA helps in understanding how people gave meaning to a new social object - the digital participatory budgeting – through their voices. Simultaneously, this approach represents a skillful approach to uncovering power imbalances signaled by "silences". The results suggest that deviations in the social representation process, namely, trivialization and reification, help us to understand the process through which citizen participation decreases. Therefore, governments seeking to improve eParticipation should, without neglecting the technical aspects, pay more attention to the social representational processes that characterize their web-based initiatives.

8. Conclusion

Our study holds a number of implications for both theory and practice. For theory, this study proposes a new understanding of the use of technology in participatory practices. The literature on eParticipation has a tendency to search for misuse or poor implementation of ICT to explain the absence of positive effects of web-based platforms on citizen participation, democratic practices and better interactions between the state and society (Grönlund, 2001; Sæbø et al., 2008; Aström et al., 2012). Our results go beyond this argument, showing that the political strategy may be one of not exploring the potential of collective and social construction and interaction of the web-based platform, thereby trivializing and reifying it. Belo Horizonte's local government developed and managed the digital platform in an exemplary manner, technically speaking. The platform that the government implemented was iterative, user-friendly, dynamic, explorative of social networks and easily accessible. However, citizens/users might abandon a cutting-edge digital platform because the key is not ICT per se but the political use of ICT through discursive practices. Our results also support our argument in favor of increasing the use of a more symbolic and cognitive lens in examining ICTrelated social phenomena. SRT as a theoretical lens provides new ways to analyze social phenomena of the type represented by eParticipation. In the case of Belo Horizonte DPB, because the anchoring process equated e-democracy with e-voting, numerous citizens lost interest. The framing of DPB as just an additional platform for voting prevented people from associating the new object with more proactive symbolic weight; DPB as voting defined a discourse in which the citizen had no active role. In addition, the reification process conveying DPB as a technology, a mere tool, helps explain the decrease in the number of participants. Seen merely as a tool, DPB loses its transformative potential as a platform to empower citizens in their relationship with the government. Analyzing the traps or failures that might occur in any social representational process, we find a plausible explanation for the decrease in citizen participation. This explanation is based on two main “deviations” of the social representational process that characterized the launching and implementation of DPB: trivialization and reification. The combination of these two unsuitable breakdowns in the representational process helps us to better understand Belo Horizonte residents' decreasing response to the decision-making call embedded in the DPB.