Empirical research and state theory: the experience of the Target Program Amendment’s legislative evaluation

• Autor(a) principal: Gaspardo, Murilo
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/191

This work constitutes the methodological chapter of the research “Institutional innovation and participatory democracy: legislative evaluation of the Target Program Amendment,” a standard approved in several Brazilian cities and from other South American countries. The methodological discussion on which such research is based presents the following fundamental questions: how to understand the democracy from thepoint of view of State Theory? What is the specificity of its approach? Would be possible to use empirical research methodology from this epistemological locus? Our hypothesis is that the empiricism providesmore objectivity to the State Theory, whose specificity would be to assume the projection of legal-political institutions as its main task, not from abstract and formalist exercises, but from the observation of the reality, especially emerging institutional experiences. The execution of the legislative evaluation about the Amendment consisted, therefore, in an attempt to verify the possibility of a coherent adoption of such methodological perspective by the State Theory. The product of this work is the description of the premisesand the methodological way of the research about the Amendment: the specification of the State Theoryconception adopted; the combination of theory and empiricism; the research problem delimitation (questions, analytical plans, hypotheses, variables and spatial and temporal cut-outs); the approach method; the procedure method and tools used; and the methodological difficulties that we faced.