Analysis of Provincial Municipalities in the Framework of E-Municipalism Practices in Turkey

Abstract

Digital applications such as e-municipality and e-government are accepted as important tools that shape the service understanding of today's society. These tools provide important gains both to the public administration, which is the essential element of public service provision, and to the citizens who are the addressees of the service. Municipalities find the opportunity to respond to the expectations and demands of the people more quickly and appropriately, as well as their close relations with the public, with e-municipality applications. The developments in the field of communication and communication have helped this opportunity to arise. The contents of public services offered by municipalities online through their web addresses are getting richer day by day in this direction. Undoubtedly, the expectations of the citizens in this direction play an important role in this enrichment. With this study, it has been determined to what extent the e-municipality understanding can be realized through web sites, with the e-municipality practices at the provincial level, democratization in local governments, quality and efficiency in service delivery, fight against bureaucracy, economical use of resources, openness and transparency. It is aimed to reveal with a content analysis to be carried out over the web addresses of 81 provincial municipalities. In this framework, first of all, the necessity of digital applications such as e-municipality and e-government and the emergence of them are conceptually discussed, then examples of e-municipality applications in Turkey are mentioned and the problems encountered in the implementation process are emphasized. In the application part, the cross-sectional, general survey model, which was carried out in quantitative methodology, is included. While the universe of the study was determined as the official web pages of all provincial municipalities in Turkey, the research was carried out on all 81 provinces without sampling. In the study, the data were collected with the help of the form prepared by the authors based on the literature review and analyzed in the SPSS program. The findings were compiled under the headings of general information on the web pages of municipalities, information on e-municipality, and information on the functionality of municipalities' e-municipality applications. As a result, it has been concluded that provincial municipalities have a tendency to show due diligence in e-municipality. It has been observed in the site analysis that this result is more concentrated in large and developed provinces and less reflected in the application in small and developing provinces.