Citizen Participation in Turkish Local Governments: Motives of Political Elites to Involve Citizens in Administrative Processes

Abstract

In Turkey, citizen participation is a fairly new concept. After being recognised as a European Union (EU) candidate in December 1999, Turkey began to pursue an unprecedented reform process challenging the existing centralised and bureaucratic state tradition. Almost all laws concerning local governments were amended in the early 2000s, and citizen participation mechanisms were widely introduced during this period. However, empirical studies show that these mechanisms were poorly implemented in local governments. One of the main reason behind this failure was identified as Turkish local public officials’ reluctance to involve citizens in administrative processes. Considering that, in Turkey, citizen participation projects are initiated by public officials rather than citizens and Turkish public officials are often reluctant to involve citizens in administrative processes, it is essential to understand Turkish public officials’ motives for citizen participation. Therefore, this thesis seeks to answer the following main research question: “What motivates Turkish local political elites to involve citizens in administrative processes?”
A person researching politicians should be careful that there may be a considerable gap between discourse and practice because politicians may exaggerate their accomplishments. Thus, this thesis has the following two sub-questions: 1) To what extent can we identify a gap between stated intentions and actions of Turkish local political elites on citizen participation? 2) To what extent is there a gap between rhetoric and reality of citizen participation in Turkish local governments?
To explore the citizen participation motives of Turkish local political elites, I used a case study approach and assessed six citizen participation practices carried out by district municipalities in four metropolitan provinces (Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Bursa) located in Western Turkey. These practices included three typical and three atypical examples of participation, and I conducted a total of 40 semi-structured elite interviews in order to explore their motives on citizen participation as well as desk review.
The findings demonstrated that the typical examples of citizen participation were top-down and concerned mainly with improving service delivery, achieving little change. Typical participation mechanisms mostly became virtually non-functional after a short period. Although the administrators argued that the reason for this was citizens’ indifference towards participation mechanisms, the findings showed that the administrators did not support participation mechanisms adequately. The most important reasons for the use of citizen participation by the local political elites were public relations, legitimising the decisions that have already been made, and therefore enhancing their prospects for re-election. In typical examples, citizen participation often remained a window-dressing ritual, and local political elites continued to have substantial control over public policies and administrative decisions. The findings showed that there was a significant gap between local political elites’ stated intentions and actions on citizen participation, and between rhetoric and reality of participation in the local governments.
On the contrary, the atypical examples of local governments wanted to become a role model for other local governments by abolishing top-down management dominating the Turkish administration system, educating citizens and reducing their levels of distrust in representatives and representative institutions. Accordingly, these local governments created important opportunities to involve citizens in administrative processes, made considerable efforts to ensure continuous citizen participation and allowed citizens to influence the decisions that concern their lives. In short, the local political elites strived to shape local policies and priorities through citizen participation. Their efforts did achieve some changes.

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ORCID for Matthew Ryan: orcid.org/0000-0002-8693-5063

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