Impact of local contact between citizens and institutions: an exploratory study related to local police services

• Grant number: 13/24239-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): January 01, 2014
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Urban Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Sergio França Adorno de Abreu
• Grantee: José Bento de Oliveira Camassa
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 13/07923-7 - Center of the Study of Violence - NEV/USP, AP.CEPID

Abstract

This project aims at assisting NEV's longitudinal research project in its first year, which will be essentially devoted to the constructing of the empirical field. The main purpose of NEV´s research is to analyze how the legitimacy of key institutions for democracy is constructed, or jeopardized, by exploring the contacts between citizens and civil servants. In other words, we are concerned with how the performance of institutions affects citizen's perceptions of political legitimacy. Empirically speaking the research program will focus on local institutions: the local municipal administration, the local school, health center, labor courts, police services, and local justice centers. It will be based on a longitudinal panel study to be carried out with the citizens of São Paulo in a number of different areas. The data to be collected will cover the respondents' experience with public services, their experience with violent victimization, their attitudes to human rights, rule of law and democracy, as well as their evaluation of the governmental institutions. Face-to-face interviews will be also carried out with civil servants from the local municipal instruments. This specific scientific initiation research will contribute to the construction of the empirical field, in terms of testing the data collection instruments - as the interviews and observation guides - and raising strategic information regarding the dynamics, the expectations, the characteristics of the "citizen-public servant relationship", with special regard to the construction of legitimacy. It will focus the relations established in local police services, as the local civil police departments (delegacias) and the community policing bases (bases da polícia comunitária).