Participação política na timeline: o Facebook como arena pública para sugestões legislativas apresentadas no e-cidadania

Abstract

The research has the theme of internet and political participation from the context: online social networks as an informal arena for discussions of SUGs (Legislative Suggestions) presented in e-Citizenship, portal of the Senate whose purpose is to encourage citizen participation. It delineates itself in studying the political participation through Facebook, from the SUGs presented in e-Citizenship. Part of the following problem question: how does political participation, through an online social network, boost the proposals of laws presented in the e-Citizenship environment? The research is justified because it is a topic of interest of the current society and the need to study the forms of appropriations that politicians and citizens make of online spaces available on the Internet. The overall goal is to investigate how the Legislative Suggestions presented in e-Citizenship gain momentum when they mobilize debates in social networks and whether, therefore, the citizens involved have caused some interference in Senate policy. The specific objectives are: to identify the mobilization strategies that the authors of SUGs presented in e-Citizenship - under the analysis of the Commission on Human Rights and Participatory Legislation (CDH) - use to promote debates on Facebook; to analyze how the political participation of the subjects linked to the SUGs' network is given; to categorize the dialogues that are established regarding the themes originated in e-Citizenship; compare the dynamics that characterize the platforms of Facebook and e-Citizenship; confirm whether the topics debated on Facebook interfere in any way with the Brazilian Federal Senate. The basic concepts of the research are: participation (MARQUES, 2008), with the idea that the tools of access to information, made available by the institutions, increase citizen participation; Habermas (1992) and Maia (2008), who think the legitimacy from the will of all and informal spaces of communication as places conducive to the formulation of society's demands; the third concept is digital democracy, de Gomes (2011), for which initiatives dedicated to the channels of expression of minorities are a step of digital democracy. The research is ethnographic approach Hine (2004; 2015), therefore, makes it possible to study the relations between subjects from mediated interactions. For the analysis I used both direct observation in e-Citizenship and participant observation in the Facebook pages of the authors of the SUGs studied. A total of five suggestions of popular initiatives compose the corpus of this research, of which three remained in discussion in the Senate and gave subsidies for the analysis of the research. The results showed that SUGs are driven to the debate in the online environment outside e-Citizenship, with Facebook being the platform used by the authors to mobilize citizens for political participation. The debate is stimulated by discussions on Legislative Ideas in social networks, with requests for support to SUGs to influence the opinion of senators to approve the proposals