In person icon Assessing Local Democracy in Türkiye: Governance, Participation and Democratization in Local Politics

Abstract

In a context of populism, autocratization, and polarization, local elections and local politics emerged as a significant dimension of political contestation in Türkiye. With the success of opposition parties in the most recent 2024 local elections, the developments at the local level, and the handling of the relations of local and central government has become a crucial dimension for the future prospects of democratization. This context of increasing political importance of local politicsin Türkiye also renders it a significant area of research, particularly with regard to the inadequate interest it has attracted until now in national and international academic studies. There have been a series of legal and administrative changes in Türkiye that incorporated the concepts of governance and subsidiarity at the level of local government as part of a broader public administration reform. This move from administration to governance was motivated by international trends, especially the rise of New Public Management paradigm, and guided by the good governance agenda of the World Bank and other international organizations. The move toward decentralization guided by the principle of subsidiarity was, on the other hand, the product of the EU accession process. The Local Agenda 2, developed by the UN Habitat, also had a significant impact in introducing a participatory perspective to local government, and most recently the Sustainable Development Goals agenda provides a similar impetus. The period of reform over the recent decades, however, is usually considered to have fallen short of its objectives, failing to make significant improvements on the dimensions of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, participation or decentralization. Major factors cited to explain this failure are the dynamics of electoral politics, the traditional predominance of centralization in public administration, and the increasing tendency of executive aggrandization. Against this background, we also observe the increasing impact of the principles of inclusiveness and citizen participation, even if limited to rhetoric in most cases. Turkiye does not have a strong tradition of citizen participation at the local government that goes beyond elections or clientelist networks, and the recent trend of democratic innovations have found limited interest and application in Turkish municipalities. Still, the widespread reference to principles of governance, participation and inclusiveness in political discourse, official documents and legislation requires an assessment of the experience and capacity of local governments in putting these principles into practice. Such an attempt at a systematic assessment of democratization at the local level, whihc would require a framework that is theoretically well-grounded, methodologically systematic and empirically productive, is clearly lacking. Studies that connect the local and national levels of politics in the context of populist politics are relatively more developed, particularly with regard to the clientelistic networks and functioning of party politics at the local level. The papers in this panel represent a collective attempt at developing such an assessment framework, and contributing to the literature on local governance and democracy in Turkey. A series of historical and political factors, most importantly the now stalled EU accession process, makes the Türkiye’s local democracy a part of the European agenda, while the role of local politics in the recent tide of populist politics and autocratization also makes it an interesting case for a broader category of countries, both within and outside Europe. The interdisciplinary contributions to the panel will provide theoretical, comparative and empirical perspectives and cover the following topics: the development of a framework for assessing the quality of local governance and democracy, a comparison of Turkey’s experience with European and non-Western countries, and two empirical studies covering the democratic potential of the City Council in Istanbul, and the planning performance of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

Title	Details
Turkey and Greece from a Fiscal Decentralization Perspective: A Comparative Study	View Paper Details
Local Governance and Democracy in Türkiye: A Framework for Assessment	View Paper Details
Inclusive Urban Futures: Participation and Democratic Innovation in Istanbul’s Local Plans	View Paper Details
Relational Analysis of Participation Environment and Actors in Istanbul: Structural Assessment of the Istanbul City Council and its Relationship Network	View Paper Details
Local Democracy in a Comparative Perspective: India, Turkey, and Europe	View Paper Details