INVESTMENTS IN COMPUTING AND THE PERFORMANCE OF REGIONAL FEDERAL COURTS DURING THE SARS-COV-2 PANDEMIC
Judiciary Power; COVID-19; Institutional Theory; Isomorphism.
As part of Public Administration, Judiciary Courts use public resources and are accountable to society. Therefore, they should seek efficiency and performance improvement. Despite this, as organizations, they are embededd into institutional environments that exert pressure on them. Thus, the present research aims to analyze, from the perspective of institutional theory, the five Tribunal Regional Federal performances in the face of changes in the IT expenses during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. To this end, information on ICT expenditures and data for calculating the net congestion charge during the years 2018 to 2021 were collected. After statistical analysis, a document analysis was conducted in search for evidence of institutional factors that justified the effects of the pandemic among the study variables. It was observed that the pandemic harmed the courts’ Net Congestion Rate and that IT investments dropped during the pandemic, although it was observed that they are related to an expectation of improvement in the courts’ productivity. Furthermore, evidence of institutional pressures that resulted in coercive and mimetic isomorphism were verified.