The Brazilian e-democracy field: a scientometric analysis of articles published between 1999 and 2020

Abstract:

This article investigates academic production on e-democracy in Brazilian journals. An automated search was performed on Google Scholar and DOAJ for keywords and, after manual filtering, resulted in an empirical corpus of 502 articles. Content analysis of these articles identified the main characteristics of the authors and the theoretical and empirical approaches to the subject. Network analysis analyzed relationships among references. The results show that these studies are largely conducted within the fields of communication and political science, that they tend to focus on the non-organized civil sphere, and that they often mobilize the concepts of participation and deliberation. Most of the articles are empirical using content analysis to examine websites and social media. We conclude by defending the construction of e-democracy as an academic field in Brazil.

Keywords: e-democracy; e-government; e-participation; e-transparency; Scientometrics