Local authorities have played a particularly important role in the development of communities, being one of the sources closest to the population. Today’s citizens have become more attentive and demanding, and do not accept an undifferentiated treatment from local elected officials. In fact, as users of the public services provided by local authorities, citizens are continuous evaluators of both their services and the public policies adopted by the elected representatives. As voters and, therefore, decision-makers, citizens certainly cast their votes for whoever they expect to meet their needs.
This study seeks to evaluate the satisfaction and define a satisfaction index of the citizens towards their municipality of residence, namely the municipality of Alfândega da Fé, Portugal.
The selected methodology was the case study, with a quantitative approach, having applied a questionnaire survey to a sample of residents in the selected municipality. In total 350 questionnaires were collected, corresponding approximately to 0.076% of the population, assuming a sampling error of 5.03%.
The results obtained regarding the Satisfaction Index show that the citizens of Alfândega da Fé are globally satisfied with their municipality of residence, scoring overall satisfaction with 73.29 points out of 100. The results also show that the dimensions ‘Quality of life in terms of leisure, access to culture, environmental
quality and safety’, ‘Image of the municipality’ and ‘Quality of basic infrastructures and services’ have the greatest weight in the overall satisfaction of the citizen with their municipality of residence.
The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support by national funds FCT/MCTES to UNIAG, under Project no. UIDB/04752/2020.
