The division in administrative dogmatic discourse:

democracy and effectiveness in public hearings on CEDAE's privatization

Abstract

Public hearings can be viewed from a double perspective: legal-dogmatic or empirical. As a legal phenomenon, these are seen as institutes, receiving greater formal delimitations in the classificatory and normative field - in its double sense, as a norm and as a theoretical-normative proposal. On the other hand, the empirical proposals of the social sciences tend to view them as an instrument - and not an institute - of social praxis, inserted in a context of disputes between civil society and the State. Firstly, I present the proposals of legal discourse and then adopt an empirical approach that is close to the qualitative research technique of content analysis (CA), to investigate the praxis of public hearings held in 2020 by the government of the State of Rio de Janeiro with the Rio Metrópole Institute and the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro, related to the CEDAE privatization project. The objective is to highlight the two divisions of Law - in relation to practical reality and in comparison to an empirically based discourse. The article shows that the so-called functions that public hearings perform in conferring legitimacy on administrative action were not shown to be present in the case studied. Regarding the effectiveness of the hearings held, there was no systematization of contributions, and it was not possible to perceive any basis for these in the final decisions. This indicates that, in the case in question, the public hearings had a merely formal character, in order to comply with the legal obligation, and did not present greater connotations of democracy or effectiveness, as is said by the dogmatic discourse.