Abstract:

Democracy has been tried to be defined with many different concepts since its emergence. The most accepted among these was that it was a political regime and that the self-directed mass of the principally managed group was self-directed. While there is a direct involvement of the rulers in the ages in the past, many different reasons, from technology to population growth, from the size of the states to the change of organizational structures, do not allow the direct participation of the people in the administration on a general scale. However, in democratic governments, participatory democracy model is adopted as an appropriate model in local organizations to meet the demands of the people to participate in the administration. Political parties, which can be seen as indispensable elements of democracy, produce various policies in order to best meet the demands of the public to participate in the administration, make promises about the issue before the elections and announce what they will do if they are elected. The purpose of this study; before the local elections of political parties in Turkey put forward in the context of local democracy and the policies they promised to implement if elected it is to analyze comparatively. The universe of the research; Turkey is the political parties who participated in the local elections held in 2014 and 2019. The sample consists of 5 political parties with the highest votes in these elections. In the research, descriptive method was preferred from qualitative methods, local election declarations / manifestos of political parties were examined by using document analysis technique and data on the subject were obtained. It has been observed that local participation is seen as an important policy by political parties and various levels of pre-election promises.

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