Luiza Teixeira
However, the Internet is a recent issue, and has started being spread out in the late twentieth century, reaching a greater range at the beginning of the XXI century. In Brazil, for example, the Internet has left the scope of the universities, and became available commercially in 1995. Thus, studies on ICTs’ use and its societal implications are fairly recent. Cunha( 2008) highlights the growing space that the internet theme is gaining in academia, and draws attention to the emergence of a scientific area facing the field of Information Systems, with research groups and academic seminars focused on the research theme. It ' s worth noting that many issues can be related to the use of ICT, allowing different possibilities for scientific research. It is possible to study, for example, the impact of ICT use in the environment, in banking, or even, investigate the possibilities of including traditionally excluded groups by means of ICT.
The establishment of ICTs use to democracy occurred naturally, as, historically, democracy has always been on a search process for reinvention, and, in fact, it seems to have been reinvented more than once, in different places( Kostakis 2011). However, ICT use has opened a wide range of possibilities for democratic action, as it brought up different forms of interaction between government and society. This variety of uses and interactions provided by ICTs brought out a different conceptualization regarding the relationship with democracy. Several authors, from different schools of thought, adopt different terminology to refer to practices related to this issue( Kostakis 2011; Cunha 2008; Benkler 2006). In the literature on ICT use in democracy we find different terminologies, such as, e‐democracy, virtual democracy, e‐governance, e‐ government, among others. However, it is not the objective of this paper to explore the differences in the use of these terminologies, but to reflect how democratic experiences, using ICTs, contribute to the deepening of democracy.
In Brazil, the democratization process involved a deepening of democracy, with the inclusion of institutional mechanisms that provided increasing civil society participation( Teixeira 2002). The 88 Constitution, also known as the " Citizen Constitution ", is a project that emerged from the struggle against the military regime. It inserted new institutional forms of participation, which included the implementation of institutional requirements in order to continue the political decentralization process, and it also involved the creation of collegiate institutions to collaborate with the formulation, execution and monitoring of public policies. The return to democracy in Brazil was marked by beliefs that relate democracy strengthening to the consolidation of traditional participation( as voting, elections and parties), but also to the expansion of new participatory channels. And these channels should allow citizens to strengthen corporate bonds and intervene in the formulation and control of collective decisions( Faria 2010).
Simultaneously with the implementation of the changes brought by the new Constitution, there was the widespread use of internet in different areas. Public administration experiences that articulate the use of ICT to develop new democratic practices have been multiplied over the years, so that, currently, most municipalities have their municipal institutional sites, where they publish public information. As a federal experience, there is the Transparency Website, which provides network information on a series of public expenditures, such as expenditures and resources transferred by the Federal Government. Institutionally, several policies have been implemented to make public information available on the network, such as the Law on Information Access( 12 527, 18 / 11 / 2011).
This paper aims, therefore, at analyzing the potentialities on the use of Information Technology in the redefinition of democratic practices. Therefore, it is intended, firstly, to submit a brief literature review on the different traditions of political thought about democracy, with a reflection on the possibility of redefinition of democratic practices, in order to achieve a cultural pluralization, and to promote the recognition of new identities. It is also intended to present how literature discusses the use of ICT in democracy. In this regard, we present a case study analysis of the I Virtual Conference on Transparency and Social Control, using the Democracy Cube Model, proposed by Fung( 2006), which considers democratic practices in three different dimensions: who the participants of the practice are, how communication and decision‐making are structured, and how the discussions can promote public policies.
2. Democracy and its different political traditions
We initiate the literature review presenting a brief historicization of the concept of democracy. The historicization of the term is intended to clarify its evolution, from the perspective of theoretical currents, and
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