| Resumo: | In this chapter, more focused on the constraints on citizens’ political participation, we intend to address the challenges – some of them already enunciated by Simões (2011) – that political participation is facing. We will consider the increasing spread and depth of ICTs and other technologies as surveillance devices, either extensively through all spheres of social activity, as well as intensively penetrating the routines of our daily lives, and provide a comprehensive analysis of the ways that surveillance can constrain political participation, or even make it impracticable, at least as we recognise it in contemporary democratic societies. Concerning the threats to democracy caused by surveillance, most current studies mainly emphasises democracy-privacy trade-offs. Our approach relies on a different assumption: that surveillance challenges our autonomy as social and political actors, and the loss of or decrease in autonomy are major threats to political participation.
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