Construindo a accountability em Câmaras Municipais do Estado de Santa Catarina: uma investigação nos portais eletrônicos

Abstract

The accountability construction is an ongoing process in the Brazilian society. It is not yet possible to say whether the forces that are fighting for democracy will overlap those that rest on the backwardness and on conservatism. It starts from the understanding that, depending on the objectives and how they are implemented, the websites can contribute to the accountability construction. Obviously, there is the risk, when creating an website, that it will merely work as an electronic mural and that there is no transparency, accountability and disclosure of the acts performed to the population, accountability dimensions discussed in this thesis. In this context, the general goal of this research is to investigate the capability of the websites of Municipalities of the State of Santa Catarina of building accountability. In the construction of the theoretical framework, the patrimonialism /neopatrimonialism is based on the predominant theory. A theoretical raid was also done on the local legislative, accountability and electronic legislative, entities understood as necessaries as to frame the empirical object. This is a descriptive research carried out through a survey, with a predominantly qualitative approach. The observation protocol and questionnaire were the instruments of data collection, drawn from the Analysis Model built based on the empirical observation, coupled with the investigation of research analysis models on websites. A descriptive analysis was used to treat the data. It was found that most of the websites have low capability of building accountability, transparency and participation. In the population class analysis, it was noticed that there is no linearity and even with larger population sizes the websites do not present better structures. Comparing the perception of the Municipal Council’s President and the data obtained from observation at the websites, the optimism of the answers doesn’t match with what was observed in the websites. It is concluded that all the websites of municipal councils located in Santa Catarina show lack of capability of enabling the construction of the accountability dimensions under study. In the proposal of Denhardt and Denhardt (2007), given the characteristics of the "New Public Service", public administrators should be responsible, transparent and obligated to disclose the accountability. What Denhardt and Denhardt (2007) are proposing are exactly those prerequisites that Campos (1990) noticed that was missing in Brazil and that Pinho and Sacramento (2009) show that, after more than 20 years, are still in slow construction. The results of this survey indicate that these conditions are still far from being met. All the potential of the electronic legislative has not been empirically observed, although this may also be explained by the maintenance of patrimonialist characteristics. Even though the websites are there, their existence seems to meet a requirement of modernity, necessary to legitimize the Councils before the dominant technological standard.