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.
