A legitimidade através da comunicação no sector público: o caso da câmara municipal da Covilhã em tempos de Covid

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand whether there is a concern in a municipal body as the Covilhã City Council to legitimize itself; gauge how it legitimizes the public processes of urgent matters, such as the Covid-19 process; and find out which categories of moral legitimacy suggested by Suchman (1995) are more important for the citizens of the municipality. In this case, legitimation through municipal communication was analyzed based on an in-depth interview with the professional responsible for communication, content analysis of press releases released by Covilhã City Council, and with data collected in four focus groups in order to understand the legitimating processes and expectations from the citizens' point of view. The results show that there an intention on legitimizing that is not translated in a strategic or tactical-planned way. Although there is an intense communication around the urgent public process, with about 14 press releases referring to it in the period of six months, these are limited to a more informative character and to the dissemination of activity and political decisions, rather than strategic or with contents that seek legitimization processes with implicit and/or symbolic dimensions. From the analysis of communication management, despite the professionalization and even a structure in the body in question, there is no decision-making autonomy, nor monitoring of the public or planning according to analyses. In this way, ad-hoc communication may mirror momentary mental strategies of the manager and the team of communication and public relations professionals, but does not consider an analysis of publics, nor the production of specific materials for each segment of citizens. These findings are in line with conclusions from studies of government communication, which suggest the need for a strategic and not only tactical approach to build intangibles (e.g. Sanders and Canel, 2013). Furthermore, the study reveals that citizens have expectations in various dimensions, including public communication in awareness-raising processes and strategies with preference to better suited tools to all age groups. As a conclusion we can state that there is no satisfaction of the communicative needs and consequently legitimacy is in question. The focus group analysis shows that younger citizens seek and expect communication processes at the level of the role of politicians and dialogical processes; the dialogical and procedural expectations decrease with the age of the groups. However, there is a predominance of structural legitimacy in all Portuguese groups, which mostly include national and regional bodies. The roles of local processes are left to the background. Consequential legitimacy has less relevance. The professional practice of communication in the public sector in the case of Covilhã Municipality regarding Covid falls short of what is proposed by the academic discipline. This study contributed to reinforce the idea that legitimacy and legitimation processes are always contextual and dependent on the environment and that, therefore, without research on publics, strategic management and strategic plans it is not possible to have an effective communication management in the public sector.