No dia 30 de Abril, Sofia Serra-Silva (ICS-ULisboa), Ana Matias (ICS-ULisboa), Rui Costa Lopes (ICS-ULisboa), Rui Oliveira (IPRI-UNL) & João Mineiro (CRIA-Iscte-IUL), serão os oradores convidados de um Seminário do Grupo de Investigação SPARC, onde vão apresentar BRIDGE Project Preliminary Findings on Mapping the Citizen–Parliament Relationship: Evidence from a Scoping Review and Focus Groups. A partir das 14h30, na Sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa e online.

Abstract:

Despite decades of research on political trust and, more broadly, on the relationship between citizens and institutions, the citizen–parliament relationship remains conceptually and empirically underdeveloped. Most scholarship has relied on a narrow set of survey-based measures — above all, trust and satisfaction — without systematically interrogating what these concepts mean to ordinary citizens or exploring the full range of dimensions through which this relationship is lived and experienced. This presentation reports preliminary findings from the first two work packages of the BRIDGE project (Bridging the Gap: A New Approach to Understanding Citizen Attitudes and Perceptions Towards the Portuguese Parliament, ICS-UL, ref. 2023.12063.PEX), which together offer both a systematic mapping of the field and a first qualitative exploration grounded in citizens' own voices.

In WP1 we ask: How has the citizen–parliament relationship been conceptualized and measured in existing literature, and what dimensions beyond trust and satisfaction have been explored? To answer this question, we systematically collected, categorized, and synthesized how this relationship has been studied, measured, and interpreted across seven decades of scholarship (1950–2025). A scoping review methodology was chosen because the field is characterized by conceptual heterogeneity and fragmented literatures; our goal was to map the breadth and depth of this scholarship, identify key concepts and measures beyond the trust–satisfaction paradigm, and highlight knowledge and empirical gaps. Systematic searches were conducted across three major databases — Scopus, Google Scholar, and APSA Preprints — following JBI methodology with two-stage screening and inter-rater reliability checks. In order to be as inclusive as possible, we incorporated qualitative, quantitative, mixed, and exclusively theoretical studies, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, resulting in a total of total of 3,807 sources retrieved and screened. The final corpus comprises 440 eligible studies. In WP2, and directly motivated by the scoping review's findings, and in particular by the near-total absence of qualitative research in this domain, we conducted 8 face-to-face focus groups sessions stratified by age and education (47 participants). Sessions followed a structured script organized around five thematic blocks: associations when speaking about the parliament; felt distance from parliament; the deconstruction of trust (what do citizens actually evaluate when they say they trust or distrust parliament?); the deconstruction of satisfaction; and parliamentary civility and behavior, explored through a short video stimulus depicting episodes of incivility in the Assembleia da República. 

Sofia Serra-Silva (ICS-ULisboa), Ana Matias (ICS-ULisboa), Rui Costa Lopes (ICS-ULisboa), Rui Oliveira (IPRI-UNL) & João Mineiro (CRIA-Iscte-IUL)