Digital Government and Inclusion in Brazil: Does Gov.br Reduce Access Barriers or Relocate Them?

Brazil’s Gov.br platform sits at the center of a rapidly expanding federal digital government agenda, raising a key inclusion question: does digitalization reduce access barriers to public services, or does it relocate exclusion into new digital bottlenecks? This study evaluates “barrier relocation” by identifying which factors best predict citizens’ difficulty completing Gov.br-enabled federal public services. Using a mixed-mode survey with two components online self-reports by focal service users and community-based proxy reports for focal users whose attempts were observed or assisted the study measures four barrier domains: connectivity constraints, digital skills, documentation/identity-related constraints, and platform design/usability frictions. Logistic regression models estimate the independent association of each domain with reported difficulty, and average marginal effects translate results into probability changes for comparability. Across 1,204 cases, 31.7% reported difficulty, with higher difficulty in proxy-reported cases than online self-reports. In the fully adjusted model, connectivity constraints increased the odds of difficulty (OR = 1.38), while digital skills reduced it (OR = 0.62). Documentation/identity constraints (OR = 2.41) and platform friction (OR = 1.71) remained strong predictors net of connectivity and skills, indicating that digital government can shift barriers from physical access costs toward identity verification pathways, record consistency, and user experience. Marginal effects show documentation/identity constraints as the largest contributor (+11.9 percentage points), followed by platform friction (+6.3) and connectivity (+4.2), while higher skills reduce difficulty (−7.6). The findings imply that inclusion-oriented digital government reform requires a combined approach improving infrastructure and capability while strengthening identity recovery and record-correction pathways and reducing avoidable design friction so that platform centralization scales access rather than scaling exclusion.