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This paper aims to measure the potential for electronic participation of Brazilian citizens via Facebook as social media, identifying latent factors that provide a favorable environment for such participation by Brazilian municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Based on these factors, the Potential Index for Electronic Participation (PIEP) of municipalities is calculated.

The theoretical discussion is based on the literature on electronic government and citizen participation. In the methodology, exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis have been used to identify latent factors and to classify PIEP according to the clusters.

The results of the research point to serious regional discrepancies regarding the level of participation in social media, highlighting an urgent need for national e-government policies to be rethought from a regionalized point of view.

The research enhances understanding of the relation between sociodemographic indicators such as income, education, employment and those concerning the access to and effective use of social media technologies by citizens and local governments.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.