SCIENTIFIC INDICATORS OF CONFIDENCE IN JUSTICE: TOOLS FOR POLICY ASSESSMENT

Objective

EURO-JUSTIS (Justice Indicators) is a project designed to provide EU institutions and Member States with new indicators for assessing public confidence in justice. Member States are making growing use of social indicators to improve policy and its assessment, but limited progress has been made in criminal justice. Common-sense indicators based on readily available statistics – such as crime trends – have been used extensively. Much less attention has been paid to crucial but hard-to-measure indicators about public confidence in justice. Without such indicators, there is a risk that crime policies may become over-focussed on short-term objectives of crime control, at the expense of equally important longer-term objectives relating to justice. The project is based on the assumption that an effective justice system must assess itself not only against narrow criteria of crime control, but against broader criteria relating to people’s trust in justice and their sense of security. In the long term, public compliance with the law depends on the legitimacy of institutions of justice. Institutions command legitimacy if people recognise that they are fair, just and provide public security. The project will develop and pilot survey-based indicators of public confidence in justice – a term used here to embrace issues relating to fairness, trust and insecurity. It will assemble contextual data for interpreting the indicators – on the assumption that there are close relationships between public perceptions of justice and the substantive quality of justice as reflected in the workings of the justice process. It will develop tools for presenting and interpreting the indicators in ways that are intuitive and accessible. The project will aim not only to develop scientifically credible indicators but also to build some consensus across Member States about the importance of assessing crime policy against criteria of public confidence, making effective dissemination a priority.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• social sciences law

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

• SECURITY AND JUSTICE
• SOCIAL INDICATORS POLICY ASSESSMENT PUBLIC CONFIDENCE CRIMINAL JUSTICE CRIME FEAR FREEDOM
• crime fear
• criminal justice
• freedom
• policy assessment
• public confidence
• security and justice
• social indicators

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-SSH - Specific Programme "Cooperation": Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• SSH-2007-6.2-01 - Improved ways of measuring both the potential for and impact of policies

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-SSH-2007-1
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

CP-FP - Small or medium-scale focused research project

Coordinator

Participants (9)