SOCIAL MARKET RESEARCH EFFECT ON LOCAL PUBLIC POLICIES: A CASE STUDY FROM GREECE

Nowadays European countries' municipalities manage a number of social services like for example municipality police, centers for supporting vulnerable citizens and cultural services. These services management includes the subsequent empowering of specific social policies. The prioritization of such policies in the past was mainly based on the proposed winning party municipality development and management program. At the moment, mayors and municipality officials in their effort to appeal to their citizens try to be responsive to their requests, often deploy market research to objectively measure the most dominant city problems and also the effectiveness of their decisions. In the study at hand longitudinal data is used, linking social market research citizens' responses to local policy spending and overall municipal services satisfaction for a period of ten years (2010-2020) for a municipality in Northern Greece. In general, the results are supporting an encouraging democracy level, where the problems that citizens are pointing out through social market research are reflected to the municipality focus and spending. However, this responsiveness differs for topics that require broader cooperation with independent third parties such as central government. These topics include local unemployment, security and culture. In short, the study shows sufficient market research- municipality responsiveness for social topics of concern that can be managed locally.