Institutions

The daily functioning, legitimacy, and effectiveness of institutions depend on the perceptions, experiences, and forms of relationship that they develop with citizens and vice versa. Therefore, the Institutions research line examines from a sociolegal perspective how people experience and understand legal and public institutions in Chile, exploring the gap between the normative ideals of law and the concrete institutional practices that shape the lives of communities.

Our work places special emphasis on everyday perceptions of legality, investigating how citizens construct their legal consciousness in contexts marked by inequality and institutional frustration. We analyze the narratives that people develop about the State, law, and institutions, studying how these perceptions vary according to territorial, socioeconomic, and generational factors, and how they influence their strategies of interaction with the legal system.

From an empirical approach that combines different methodological tools, we explore phenomena such as institutional delegitimization, the dynamics of access to justice, and the tensions between citizens' normative expectations and the results that institutions actually produce. We also investigate how changes in academic professionalization have reconfigured the production of legal knowledge in the country and how caregivers conceive their rights and interactions with specialized state agencies.

In sum, the projects of this line seek to highlight and better understand the often conflictive relationship between citizens and legal institutions, contributing to the development of policies that strengthen the legitimacy and effectiveness of the legal system, and recognizing the experiences and expectations that diverse social groups have regarding law and the State.