Higher Public Officials on Direct Citizen Participation in Turkey

Abstract

Governments are expected to introduce public policies to empower citizens to engage in government business for various reasons including trust building. This chapter presents enablers/barriers before direct citizen participation (DCP) in Turkey by employing interviews conducted with higher public administrators at the ministerial level. The results reveal that DCP is mostly used for informing and consultation purposes rather than fostering a citizen deliberation. The main barriers before DCP are found as centralized bureaucratic structure, lack of administrators' awareness for DCP, and a lack of participation culture. The authors argue that DCP could be fostered where public officials are curious rather than institutionalized.

An analysis of the public administration curricula in Turkey: Realities, expectations, and attitudes toward novel courses

“…In reply to this question, we take Turkey as a case study due to its long administrative and statehood tradition that goes back to old Persian and Seljukian traditions, its present position that holds a candidacy to EU membership, and represents a connecting status between the East and the West. Saylam et al (2020) argue that we need a plea for new kinds of practical, conceptual, and theoretical perspectives when dealing with the challenges posed by the developments in the field of public administration. This plea particularly includes a growing need to give more room for cases from developing countries (Xue, 2018), a reorganization of PA curricula (Roberts, 2018), and a new administrative doctrine as the curious public administrator (Hatcher, 2019).…”

“…Taking all these propositions asserted by Saylam et al (2020) in one, this paper aims to analyze the PA curricula in Turkish universities. Not taking all the PA departments that is up to 130 departments, we need to set a limitation according to entrance exams for selecting the district administrators.…”