In recent years, political science has been studying how democratization of procedures used for choosing government reflected on changes to the modus operandi of state institutions, in order to facilitate the institutionalization of the idea of substantive democracy in Brazil. From the analysis of data gathered from 172 police stations from eight states and evaluated in 2010, collected by etnomethodology, this paper discusses how the adjectives used to qualify Brazilian democracy (disjunctive, incomplete, paradoxical) are still present in the daily routines of the so-called "Civil Police", besides the fact that redemocratization started in this country 18 years ago.
police stations; Civil Police; democracy; political sociology; citizenship
