Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
CROATIAN AND COMPARATIVE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, cilt.20, sa.3, ss.497-522, 2020 (ESCI)
Due to the country's then drive towards European Union membership, a comprehensive administrative reform agenda had emerged in Turkey during early 2000s. But a brusque reversal of decentralisation reforms followed the 2010 constitutional referendum. The reform agenda adopted in the 2000s had been overturned to lead to an increasingly authoritarian and centralised power. This recentralisation movement had a direct impact on local governance, triggering a decline of local autonomy accompanied by the dismissal of elected mayors and city council members in some Kurdish-populated cities. The fast decay of democratic accountability was accompanied by clientelism and corruption. This paper tries to demonstrate how recentralisation in Turkey led to the erosion of local democracy through two analytical parameters used to assess the quality of democracy: the first parameter concerns the level of political autonomy, while the second pertains to whether local administrations' decisions are safeguarded from arbitrary interference by the central government.