A Tocquevillian assessment of a tool to promote monitorial citizenship in Brazil.

The MIT Center for Civic Media (civic.mit.edu) has developed a system called Promise Tracker (www.promisetracker.org) comprised by a Web platform and a mobile app that help citizens to keep track of promises made by government officials during campaign season in order to hold them accountable for their commitments. The system has been tested in different cities of Brazil. The stated goal of this social technology is to promote the engagement of ordinary citizens in the political life of their communities between election cycles. This paper reflects on the premises and preliminary results of this experience using Alexis de Tocqueville's insights about the early development of democracy in America. For him, democracy was not a mere political system, but first and foremost a social state that stemmed from the egalitarian trend in Modernity and that encompassed all dimensions of communal life. His rich view of democracy is used here to explain and evaluate the aforementioned experience to engage civil society and broaden the public dialogue in Brazilian cities with the aid of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]