Citizen-Centered Public Policy Making in Turkey

Recently, the public policy field seems to be extensively nourished by studies focusing on public service design and implementation phases. Regarding the public policy actors, however, few studies promote the stakeholders, particularly the citizens, as the service demanders. We believe more room should be reserved for studies focusing on direct citizen participation. The recent shifts in understanding in public administration and policy, as well as the internet and information technologies that have developed recently, can provide theoretical and practical inspiration for the upcoming studies focused on direct citizen participation. While the change in understanding has enriched the intellectual basis of participation and increased its political support, alternative channels such as e-participation and e-government have promoted citizens’ participation in public policies easier, more straightforward, and more direct. This introductory chapter aims to build a baseline for the sprouting discussions in the citizen-centered public policy making issue by giving the audience a general perspective on the public policy process, actors, citizens as an actor, and direct citizen participation.

Public policy is one of the most fundamental tasks of governments today. They carry out various social activities, such as preventing social conflicts, mobilizing public resources, organizing bureaucratic organizations, and collecting taxes from people. This chapter mentions different approaches to public policy making that have emerged so far. It first mentions theoretical approaches to public policy based on what public policy making is and how it was born. In this way, it explains the reasons for the emergence of different views on public policy making and these different approaches. It then explains the frameworks and perspectives put forward for the public policy making process. Thus, it mentions different ideas about how public policy making should be. In this sense, the purpose of this chapter is to draw a general framework for these approaches and to reveal the theoretical and conceptual background for public policy making. In this context, it presents a summary of the discussions on the public policy making process, both theoretically and practically.

Ethics and values shape public policy processes and analysis. Public administration and policy have “normative” aspects, and normative public policy explores the role and relevancy of beliefs, interests, goals, values, and principles in public policy and management. The roots of normative discussions on efficiency, effectiveness, and economy go back to the early days of the field. After the mid-1960s, a discussion of ethics and values regained importance in public administration and policy, emphasizing diversity, equality, and fairness. Since the late 1970s, market-based approaches have become dominant with an increased focus on efficiency, economy, market, and customer-orientation. Yet, a critique of market-based approaches (especially the new public management [NPM]) and values has been developing since the 1990s. The public value management’s (PVM) new emphasis on the “public value” seems to challenge the NPM approach and some premises of the classical public administration. Based on a literature review and hermeneutics, this chapter first discusses normative public policy, public values, and principles. Second, a general review of the PVM, its comparison with the NPM and a discussion on the “public value” is presented. Finally, value conflicts in public policy processes are explored with specific reference to the case of justice and efficiency in welfare.

The view of achieving the desired results in public policies depends on steering individuals, with decisions and actions incompatible with rationality, in a predictable way has pushed policymakers to collaborate with psychology methods and theories. Accordingly, in the recent policy design of public authorities, there is an increasing interest in the nudge approach, which is considered a less costly, more liberal, more citizen-focused alternative to traditional policy instruments. Nudging, which has produced effective solutions for different social problems, has also brought with it many criticisms. These criticisms have led to questioning alternative and advanced new policy tools in the field of behavioral public policy. In this study, the “nudge-plus” approach is discussed as one of these policy tools, which was put forward by Peter John and Gerry Stoker and which argues that the criticisms directed to nudge can be overcome by incorporating a citizen-oriented perspective into the nudge approach. This study aims to draw attention to the prediction that the use of the nudge-plus method in public policy design can produce more effective results in line with today’s participatory and collaborative administration approach.

In the neo-Tocquevillian tradition, the participation of civil society in public policy has been considered an essential pillar of democracy and participatory governance. This chapter reviews factors that influence civil society participation in the public policy processes in Turkey. Academic scholarship indicates that political opportunities, the nature of policies, the characteristics of civil society, and the networks of actors determine the access of civil society to public policies. Using this multidisciplinary framework, I argue that shifting political opportunity structures, statist policy style, scant resources of civil society, and polarization in the civic sphere have left little room for civil society participation in public policies in Turkey. Understanding the nexus between civil society and public policy in Turkey highlights how civil society in a closed system with limited opportunities remained at the periphery of policy making and the inclusion and exclusion of civil society from the policy processes. Thus, this chapter contributes to civil society and public policy debates by outlining the factors determining civil society access to policy processes in the country.

While some social networks might purposefully be established for participation, in some cases, social networks might already exist and possess the potential to contribute to citizen participation. This chapter aims to introduce the latter and identify sui generis social networks of citizen participation practices in Turkey. The main arguments of this chapter are as follows: (a) social networks already exist in social and political spheres and (b) one cannot comprehend the one-of-a-kind “potential” networking structures merely from a legal-administrative viewpoint, a thorough evaluation shall include a broader socio-cultural and historical perspective. In the first part, hemşehri (hometown fellowship) ties, their associations, and their contribution to participatory democracy are elaborated from the network perspective. In the second part, mahalle (neighborhood of Turkey) and mukhtar (headmen of mahalle) are assessed, focusing on the network characteristics, their role in citizen-state relations, and their potential to contribute to local citizen participation. Finally, city councils, a quasi-institutionalized network for local participatory democracy, are discussed. The main findings for all network structures are needs of (a) empowerment of those enabling networks for citizen participation, (b) provision of legal basis to fully fulfill their role in participation, and (c) emphasizing their role in participation rather than service provision.

While e-participation methods have become widespread and strengthened the two-way interaction between governments and citizens in public policy making, the inclusion of the technology dimension in the citizen participation process has also brought new challenges. The digital divide literature suggests that due to the disparities in access, skills, motivation, usage context, and usage opportunities related to the ICTs, there can be additional disadvantages for certain segments of society who cannot evenly make use of the opportunities provided by the digital world because of their socioeconomic status, race, age, gender, and geography. This inequality may also concern political participation, particularly citizen participation in policy making. The aim of this chapter is to describe the relationship between electronic citizen participation and the digital divide and explain the implications of the digital divide for citizen participation in public policy making. It first characterizes the process of e-participation in policy making for citizens, along with a discussion on the tools of e-participation. Next, the digital divide issue is reviewed using different literature conceptualizations. Following this, the relationship between e-participation and the digital divide and the implications of the digital divide for citizen involvement in public policy making are discussed.

The concepts of citizen-centricity and e-participation have gained importance in studies on e-government and e-governance regarding citizens’ new position in politics as influencers of public policies. However, complexities within the concepts of e-government, e-governance, citizen-centricity, and e-participation prevent realizing systematic and substantial analyses of digital transformation in the public sector. This chapter defines the conceptual complexities of e-government, e-governance, citizen-centricity, and e-participation. The study, first, deals with e-government and e-governance mainly used to explain digital transformation and reform in the public sector. Then, it explains different approaches and frames in the literature as well as the categories of centricity concerning different approaches to e-government and e-governance. The study also illustrates the top-down and bottom-up processes to centricity. Finally, it explains the complexities of e-participation and its different types with the help of top-down and bottom-up approaches. The study contributes to the field by presenting conceptual complexities and confusion, thus providing a better understanding of e-government and e-governance in the era of interactive digital platforms with the help of powerful frames in the literature, and also proposes a schema on the different forms of e-participation.

Equal access to citizenship is an important part of democracy. Yet, many disadvantaged groups do not enjoy their citizenship rights. This study therefore asks the question of why some groups are unable to exercise the rights conferred by citizenship, focusing on a qualitative case study of the Roma in Turkey. Even though the Roma population in Turkey is one of the highest in Europe, studies on the Roma in Turkey are limited. In addition, this research presents a citizen-centered analysis based not only on ordinary citizens but also on the disadvantaged ones. Drawing from active citizenship theory, this chapter discusses whether (i) an active participation helps disadvantaged groups to solve their problems and benefit from citizenship opportunities, and whether (ii) the lack of social capital hinders active participation for the disadvantaged groups. The findings illustrate that the lack of social capital precludes the Roma in Turkey from enjoying active citizenship.

Considering the women’s crucial role in state nationalism, this study focuses on the relationship between increasing women’s participation in politics and producing effective policies for women in the case of contemporary Turkey. To unpack this relationship, the number of women elected to the Turkish National Assembly in the AKP era—which is called descriptive representation—is focused on the one hand, and the AKP’s viewpoint on women’s participation in politics and the effects of women’s presence in the Parliament—which is called substantive representation—is examined on the other hand. The result of a discourse analysis of the illustrative samples of party programs, government programs, and speeches of political elites shows that AKP’s women’s policies are based on imagining women in the family, and this breeds the inactive political participation of women. Although Turkish women during the AKP rule have had the highest proportion of representation in the Parliament throughout the national history, descriptive representation could not transform into substantive representation.

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, the democracy we recognize has been under crisis. According to the Regimes of War (RoW) classification, more than five billion people live under authoritarian governments. Exclusionary considerations are a defining characteristic of democracies. The rise of authoritarian governments, populist regimes, and technocratic government has opened up new opportunities for citizen participation. These pathways contribute to the institutionalization of social inequality based on gender roles, low education levels, rurality, and immigration. Digital democracy is viewed as a solution to this problem of inefficiency, and it is expected that technological advancement would increase citizen engagement opportunities. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that digital democracy does not directly reduce social exclusion and institutionalizes social inequality. My multivariate findings show that demographic and socioeconomic variables play significant roles as predictors of political participation, particularly in non-conventional, social, and online dimensions. Political engagement and membership in CSOs are two crucial factors influencing citizens’ decisions; more politically engaged and experienced citizens prefer new ways of participation over voting. Intriguingly, internet participation is positively connected with confidence in political institutions. Education has both indirect and direct benefits, although a greater socioeconomic status is connected with lower civic participation levels than political participation levels.

The transforming administrative approach in public administration after the 1980s made the citizen more visible and made it possible to include the ideas and wishes of the citizens at every stage of the public policy process. In addition to the changing approach, the crisis in the field of representative democracy has also made it common for citizens to participate in the public policy process through direct citizen participation tools. Although the benefits of direct citizen participation for the administrations are too crucial to ignore, it also contains some challenges. The goal of this chapter is to analyze the challenges of direct citizen participation under three headings: “the challenges arising from the nature of citizen participation,” “the difficulties arising from the design of the citizen participation process,” and “other challenges,” and then point out some suggestions for effective citizen participation. As a result, this chapter suggests increasing and supporting e-participation opportunities, designing scientific research to overcome the challenges in front of direct citizen participation, and increasing the examples in the literature regarding the design of the direct citizen participation process in different countries.

In this chapter, the citizen-oriented mechanisms of the Turkish Ministry of Interior (MoI) will be discussed according to the OECD’s public engagement classification. The MoI aims to ensure citizen-focused provision of local services and to increase citizen satisfaction. Through citizen satisfaction surveys, numerous efforts have been made to measure citizens’ expectations. With the use of crucial mechanisms such as open offices, Local Prevention and Security Boards, and a Law Enforcement Monitoring Commission, citizens’ needs, demands, and complaints are ascertained. The majority of the services offered by the MoI are now digitalized thanks to information and communication technologies including online e-government portals. Through performance evaluation and monitoring systems, performance indicators are gathered, assessed, and evaluated for ongoing improvement. However, although there is one significant example of an active participation mechanism in the internal security field, namely Local Prevention and Security Boards, the Turkish MoI mostly employs information and consultation procedures. In this chapter, the public is defined as citizens instead of customers or clients, because citizens are not passive service receivers. Citizens take part actively in service provision by evaluating services, and they also take part in the formulation of public policy making processes as partners.

This chapter aims to reveal the extent to which the local governments in Turkey benefit from social media in citizen-centered policy making processes. In this chapter, a two-stage study was designed on the use of citizen-centered social media in local governments in Turkey. In this context, the engagement analysis was applied in the first stage of the study, and content analysis was implemented in the second stage. We selected Twitter as the social media tool in this chapter. Within the scope of the study, we examined the Twitter accounts of metropolitan municipalities in Turkey. According to the findings of the engagement analysis, it was found that the engagement scores of the metropolitan municipalities were generally low. On the other hand, according to the content analysis findings, it was concluded that metropolitan municipalities mainly used the social media for one-way information-sharing purposes such as events, announcements, and news. It was clear that the findings of both analyses were compatible with the relevant literature. Consequently, it is explicit that the metropolitan municipalities in Turkey cannot effectively use the social media to create citizen-centered policies.

Smart cities are based on the idea of creating more liveable and sustainable cities through the information and communication technologies (ICT) for their services. The ultimate goal of a smart city is to make cities healthier and sustainable for its residents, remove bureaucratic barriers before access to public services, introduce innovative solutions to city-related problems, and consider citizens’ wishes and expectations. Smart cities that involve citizens in the service delivery process and implement many participatory principles and institutional mechanisms for this can be defined as citizen-centric smart cities. In this chapter, citizen-centric smart city practices of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality during the time of COVID-19 are addressed, and these practices are categorized under six groups. These are smart transportation, e-municipality practices, voluntary participation, crowdfunding, open government data, and free internet access - support for distance learning. This chapter concludes that it is essential for local communities to develop collective behavior to cope with a pandemic, and as technology users citizens roles are critical. Further developing digital healthcare practices and distance education and channelizing resources toward these practices become a prominent field in the post-pandemic stage.

There is a growing body of research in the democratization of science, participatory governance, and citizen science within the extant Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature. The COVID-19 pandemic is a challenge not only in the medical sense but also for public policy due to limited data availability and deliberation process in policy making. This study focuses on the role of data activists in citizen-centered public policy making during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey. We examine two cases to argue that there was a data vacuum and data activists got extremely creative with the available data to satisfy the public’s hunger for information and to facilitate the deliberation process through Twitter. In each case, data activists challenged the official discourse and provided their data analysis in a clear and concise manner that could be understood by the public easily. Twitter’s growing importance in the democratization of science became obvious, as it was the medium where most interaction happened.

Citizen-centered approaches in policy making and implementation have become widespread in the past decades. Various instruments have been developed to ensure citizen involvement in policy processes. There is a rich repertoire of policy instruments to ensure citizen involvement in the environmental policy making process. Yet again, there are several barriers to realizing citizen involvement in policy processes in different parts of the world. Turkey is not an exception, and there are few opportunities and venues for citizen-centered environmental policy making in Turkey. In that respect, efforts toward citizen involvement in the environmental policy process is a struggle of unheard voices to make themselves heard in the policy process. This chapter will start with a brief introduction to the use of citizen-centered environmental policy making. In this context, theoretical issues on citizen involvement will be discussed concerning relevant literature. In the next section, the barriers to citizen-centered environmental policy making in Turkey will be summarized, and finally, the citizens’ struggles and tactics in making their voices heard will be analyzed.

In line with global trends, housing affordability has once again emerged as a worrying problem of housing policy in Turkey in recent years. Although the strong housing production process in the Turkish economy, low housing affordability is an ever-increasing concern in many areas and various household groups, such as low-income citizens or tenants. The study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding and information by addressing the reasons behind the housing affordability problem from both the supply and demand aspects. In addition, the study details how the 2018/19 economic crisis and COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the deepening of the housing affordability crisis for citizen with different socio-economic characteristics. Using descriptive analysis, changes in housing permits, house prices, mortgage rates, and homeownership rates are discussed as they relate to housing affordability for low- and middle-income citizens. The findings of the study show that housing affordability is deteriorating especially for low- and middle-income citizens in Turkey. Finally, the study presents suggestions on how a social housing policy should be in the interest of the low-income groups and vulnerable citizens comprehensively in addressing the housing affordability problem.

This chapter addresses the state of Citizen-centered policy making (CPM) in the Turkish Education System (TES) by drawing and theorizing on the policy making cycle. Once elaborating on key approaches for CPM and describing the key challenges in CPM, the chapter discusses CPM approaches and practices in education. The chapter argues that over-centralization, overpopulation, and resulting change inflation are the key characteristics of TES, which fundamentally reduce the capacity of the system to demonstrate CPM in educational policy making. These characteristics result in a culture of “non-participation” in educational policies in TES, where the key constituencies in the system mostly fail to contribute to educational policies. National Education Council (NEC) conventions were used as showcases to demonstrate the lack of active citizen participation in educational policy making in TES. According to prominent results of the study, although there are several attempts of the government to include citizens in the educational policy making process, this has not been accomplished in each step of the policy process, which results in not only a lack of participation of the stakeholders in some steps but also illusory stakeholder involvement in others.

This chapter assesses the reflections of citizen-centered public policies (CCPP) in Turkey’s higher education (HE) policy and implementations. It begins by briefly framing the CCPP in Turkish public administration and deepens the analysis by transforming the HE policy and practices in line with citizen-centered public policy-making. The organization of the chapter was formulated to include three main issues as framed by Undheim and Blakemore (A Handbook for Citizen-centric eGovernment, European Commission, EU Institutions.https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/2014-12/media1781.pdf Accessed 1 Oct 2022, 2007) while examining the citizen-centered policies in terms of three groups that produce and/or consume government services. To this end, a general portrait of how higher policies and implementations are transforming in the current era is discussed for these three groups: politicians, policymakers, and producers and users. As the methodological approach, the narrative literature review is carried out through journal articles, reports (e.g., OECD), legislation, and documents of Council of Higher Education (CoHE) produced to regulate the citizen-centered policies in HE. By presenting a comprehensive overview of CCPP in Turkey, this up-to-date review has the potential to serve as a reference source for academics and students who want to make international benchmarking.

In this study, we focus on the central question of how Turkey managed the expansion of its higher education system in terms of public policies and public interest over the past 20 years. We analyzed public policy documents, academic papers, and written records such as news websites and newspaper columns to evaluate how the recent expansion in Turkish higher education evolved and impacted the quality of Turkish universities. Our findings indicated that during the third expansion era starting in the early 2000s, the Turkish higher education system was successful in improving access to higher education immensely. The government’s openness to expansion and the pressure from the members of Parliament for different areas of Turkey were effective in this process. On the other hand, after the expansion period, the quality of instruction, student services, and research were impacted negatively in many newly founded universities. In conclusion, with a citizen-centered public policy making perspective, the relevant literature and the written records from different sources show that the expansion was a correct policy decision; however, all stakeholders of the higher education system had question marks about how this process was managed.

Health services have shown significant developments throughout the world in the last century. In addition, the status and outcomes of diseases are substantially changed. In the past, infectious diseases were the most critical health problems, but today, chronic diseases have taken their place. Until the Second World War, health systems focused on eradicating diseases. Afterward, with the expansion of the definition of health by the World Health Organization, this situation changed, and the concept of patient-centered health care emerged. The idea of patient-centered health care was put forward as an essential dimension of quality health care in the late 1970s, but it could not see the expected value. Recent changes in medicine and health systems introduced a patient-centered approach instead of a disease- and physician-centered approach. However, the current global changes emphasize the necessity of providing health services with sensitive and people-centered systems. This chapter has examined people-centered health practices, which are in demand worldwide, from the perspective of health policies in Turkey.

Citizen-oriented economic policies require policymakers to evaluate the possible effects of the implemented economic policies on citizens and make decisions based on these evaluations. In other words, citizen-oriented policies require prioritizing decisions to increase the economic welfare of individuals. Undoubtedly, policymakers also want to increase the economic welfare of individuals. Increasing the social welfare of citizens is one of the leading aims of economic policies. This aim requires considering the possible effects of policy implementations on citizens. This study examines the design of citizen-oriented economic policies and their reflections on citizens in the context of Turkey. Achieving economic growth goals through the increase in capital stock will lead to sustainability in employment and disposable income increase. Achieving the goal of price stability will contribute to the protection of citizens’ purchasing power. The citizen-oriented implementation of economic policies will increase the sustainability and effectiveness of the social benefit obtained from these policies.

Citizen orientation in public security has come to the fore since the 1990s upon rising crime rates and fear of crime. As a result, focus on the root causes of crime and targeted initiatives to restore public trust have guided citizen-centered public security. Gained momentum with the EU accession negotiations in the 2000s, citizen-oriented policies and practices have also been integrated into Turkey’s public security management. Citizen orientation can be seen through participative, community-oriented, and oversight undertakings. In this context, this chapter investigates Turkey’s public security policy to explore how citizen orientation has been implemented. The study suggests that committee-type bodies and e-government applications have been vastly utilized to improve citizen participation. In contrast, community-oriented initiatives, alongside nationwide community policing, have focused on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, relying on awareness raising and information. Civilian oversight of public security has made remarkable progress by upgrading an integrated state-wide accountability system. Yet it needs more autonomy, national recognition, and ownership for more effective functioning. For long-term gains, more behavioral interventions must support restructuring and project-based efforts. To conclude, citizen-centered public security in Turkey has been underway and will likely produce more favoring outcomes in the next decade.