Democracia digital e pesquisa empírica no Brasil: Metodologias, instrumentos e abordagens do campo

In recent years, analyzes about Digital Democracy have grown significantly and today it is already a field with several published studies. The objective of this work is to produce an exploratory bibliometric study with an overview of the current stage and characteristics of the empirical research on Digital Democracy. For this, it sets a basic conceptual framework on this concept and then it produces a mapping of the main indicators of this field, based on a representative sample of empirical-methodological studies published in indexed Brazilian journals. The sample consists of 73 articles published in 28 Brazilian scientific journals. This corpus was analyzed by a set of 22 variables that characterized the main indicators on the articles. The results reinforce the tendency towards multidisciplinarity in this field, but with a leading role in areas such as Communication, Political Science and Administration. It also demonstrated that the volume of publication is increasing, being characterized by exploratory or descriptive studies. Government platforms or websites and social media were the most frequent object of analysis. Despite the digital character of the phenomenon studied, data collection still makes an incipient use of software or scripts.