Paper long abstract:

Current researches largely present the surveillance threats to democracy focusing mainly in the democracy-privacy trade-offs. Our framing consists in a twofold proposition: focusing on the political participation in all spheres of public daily life; and concentrate on the key concept of autonomy to understand the conditions for political participation. Regarding political participation, the loss of privacy is nowadays the major threat to autonomy.

When most people face privacy-security trade-offs, they rapidly choose security over privacy. Are they aware of the consequences to their autonomy brought by the loss of privacy, like losing their faculty and power to make political choices and to participate in decision-making within the public domain? Thus, autonomy is a central issue regarding the threats to political participation.

In the 20th century, previously to the emergence of ICT, political sociology mainly kept at large the crucial issue of autonomy, what has not happened within points of view that are more liberal. An action is autonomous if it respects the will of the individual, which implies not to be constrained.

Surveillance has increased exponentially in contemporary societies, either extensively through all spheres of social activity, as intensively penetrating in the routines of our daily lives. Transparent citizens may hardly be politically free.

This paper intends to analyse as surveillance is reconfiguring the political participation. This analysis embraces the way surveillance threats the autonomy effectiveness and the consequences to further political participation. Is also considers the changes in political participation due to surveillance, considering that individuals need three conditions - resources, opportunities and motivation - to be politically active.