Accountability democrática em portais eletrônicos do órgão deliberativo municipal: uma análise comparativa entre as capitais brasileiras e as capitais dos distritos portugueses

Abstract

The Democratic Rule of Law, in recognizing popular sovereignty, brought managerial and corporate governance characteristics to the Public Administration. Among the elements of public governance, accountability is analyzed in this study under the democratic vertex, being an important link between the political communities, the organization of political institutions and agency issues. The research presented here seeks to answer the following question: to what extent is the information available on the electronic portals of the municipal decision-making body in Brazilian capitals and in the capitals of Portuguese districts contributing to the construction of democratic accountability? The main objective is to assess and compare the levels of democratic accountability of these portals. To this end, mixed methods were adopted: a first qualitative phase, using bibliographical and documental research, following the techniques of Content Analysis for the construction of an observation form; and a second quantitative phase, with the proposition of an innovative instrument for measuring democratic accountability (the Local Deliberative Democratic Accountability Index – IADL), which varies from 0 to 1 and is scaled in ranges ranging from “very low” to “very high”, in addition to statistical comparisons between the countries, regions and dimensions analyzed, based on the global and complementary IADL (Accountability, Democracy and ICT). The results show that even though these electronic portals pay special attention to accountability demands (Brazil with IADLa 0.726 and Portugal IADLa 0.719) and use the available technological resources satisfactorily (Brazilian IADLt 0.641 and Portuguese IADLt 0.623), they present significant flaws in the implementation of democratic mechanisms, with a particular lack of these instruments on Portuguese websites (IADLd 0.504 for Brazil and only 0.188 for Portugal). In the case of Brazil, the study still reveals important divergences in the communication of accountability practices between the south and southeast regions of the others. Safeguarding the cultural and operational differences between the Brazilian municipal councils and the Portuguese municipal assemblies, the fact is that both bodies require more porosity with society, in order to establish an effective and two-way communication.