This Article is a revised and extended version of the paper titled "Sub-district Municipalities Removed in the Light of 20014 Local Elections" which was presented during 12 th Public Administration Forum hosted by Adnan Menderes University on 12 th-14 th September, 2014. bstract: Law no 6360 of 2012 on "The Establishment of Fourteen Metropolitan Municipalities and Twenty-Seven Districts and Amendments at Certain Law and Decree Laws" was often focused starting from its drafting process. However, it is considered that removal of sub-district municipalities as foreseen by the Law was not discussed in-depth despite the developing literature in this field. In fact, characteristics of sub-district municipalities are pretty important in terms of democracy theory and the relationship between local governments and democracy. In this study, removal of sub-district municipalities has been discussed in terms of subsidiarity, representation, participation and efficiency, in an indirect way, taking into account the views above and Değirmendere Municipality case. Değirmendere Municipality, which had considerable municipality experience in terms of local governments and was removed by Law no 5747 of 2008, was chosen as a model since it represents an important experience in this field and it was annexed to Kocaeli Metropolitan Municipality which was stated in the explanatory note of the Law no 6360. In this regard, general findings of the literature in this topic is evaluated and developments in Değirmendere case is analysed through interviews with the previous and current managers of the municipality in this article. Based on the results, it is argued that success of Değirmendere sample in efficiency, after a choice between efficiency and democracy, tends to represent some serious problems for the essence of local governments.

30 March 2014 Local Elections were held in Turkey at the end of an extraordinarily political process and in a highly polarized atmosphere. The election exceeded the limits of the characteristic of “being local” due to such developments recorded in the pre-election period as anti-government social opposition raised against Justice and Development Party (JDP) by Gezi Park protests, tension between judicial and executive organs resulting from the power struggle between the political, social and economic interest groups and corruption investigations opened against the ministers. Ruling JDP Government turned the election into a confidence vote and Turkey entered into the local election process with the new metropolitan model (“Whole City” model). Colorful, vivid and costly election process ended up with a political geography of local election, which should be subjected to new and important analyses. Thus this chapter discusses the issue of local autonomy over pre-election propaganda process, new metropolitan municipality model, election results and political geography analyses.