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Citizen-Centered Public Policy making Through Social Media in Local Governments: A Research on Twitter Accounts of Metropolitan Municipalities in Turkey

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Citizen-Centered Public Policy Making in Turkey

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although social networks are primarily understood when it comes to social media, the scope of the concept of social media is essentially broader. In this respect, it should be noted that social media also includes interaction platforms such as blogs, microblogs (Twitter), wikis (Wikipedia), podcasts (Apple iTunes), forums, and content communities (Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube).

  2. 2.

    In this context, according to the 2021 report of We Are Social Digital, which includes global and country-based analyses within the framework of main metrics such as internet, social media, e-commerce, prepared by We Are Social and Hootsuite, there are 4.20 billion social media users worldwide. This rate represents more than 53% of the global population. In Turkey, 70.8% of the population actively uses social media. It is clear that this rate is much higher than the world average. On the other hand, a social media user in Turkey spends about 2 hours and 57 minutes on social media platforms, which is above the world average.

  3. 3.

    In the content analysis, we wanted each municipality to be included in the analysis with an equal number of tweets. For this, we did not select a date range for the tweets to be reviewed. As it will be remembered, we focused on the tweets of the last month in engagement analysis. The average number of tweets sent by metropolitan municipalities in the last month was 112. So, focusing on the last 100 tweets means that the content analysis has covered roughly the last month.

  4. 4.

    In the study of Sobacı and Hatipoğlu (2017), Van M.M. ranks 3rd and Balıkesir M.M. 5th.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bursa Uludağ University, Bursa, Turkey

    Fatih Gürses & İbrahim Çelik

  2. Sivas Cumhuriyet University, Sivas, Turkey

    Erkan Arslan

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  1. Fatih Gürses
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Correspondence to Fatih Gürses .

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  1. Department of Political Science & Public Administration, Afyon Kocatepe University, Afyonkarahisar, Türkiye

    Volkan Göçoğlu

  2. Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance (UNU-eGOV), United Nations University, Guimarães, Portugal

    Naci Karkin

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Gürses, F., Arslan, E., Çelik, İ. (2023). Citizen-Centered Public Policy making Through Social Media in Local Governments: A Research on Twitter Accounts of Metropolitan Municipalities in Turkey. In: Göçoğlu, V., Karkin, N. (eds) Citizen-Centered Public Policy Making in Turkey. Contributions to Public Administration and Public Policy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35364-2_14

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