Budget perception of city councils from participatory budget perspective in local governments: Example of the Yunus Emre City Council of the Manisa Municipality

As part of a changing public administration approach, participatory budgeting approach has emerged as a model that enables citizens to participate in the preparation process of local government budgets and to allow them to monitor public expenditures. Within the framework of this understanding based on the participation of the community at the local level, city councils constitute an important step in increasing public participation and reflecting their preferences during the budgeting process. In the process of preparation of local government budgets, there is a mutual interaction between participatory budgeting and city councils in order to ensure efficient and efficient use of scarce resources and to ensure their supervision. Therefore, the focus of the study is to measure the budgetary perceptions of city councils formed with the participation of local people and to determine whether they have sufficient knowledge and skills. The key point to be considered is how the city council members make their decisions when they make their decisions: Do they know the budget? Do they know the process? Measuring this is important. Because a council that does not know about the budget cannot make the right decisions for the effective use of scarce resources. The most basic units in which democracy can take place are the city councils in local administrations, and if the members of the city councils do not have sufficient knowledge and skills about the budget, public resources may be wasted in the decisions to be taken. The study consists of three parts. In the first part, information was given about the local government units based on the concepts of governance and governance, and participatory budgeting approach based on increasing public participation within the framework of participation concept was discussed. In the second part the participants to take the most important institutions budgeting into practice in Turkey is aimed to give information about the city councils. Explaining the effectiveness of city councils, budget perceptions were put forward. In the last part of the study, a survey was conducted with the members of the City Council of the Yunusemre Municipality, which is one of the two central districts of Manisa. In the light of the findings obtained and transformed into numerical data, necessary analyzes were done in SPSS package program. Within the scope of the study, it was tried to determine whether they were aware of their importance in the budget process and in this context, current budget information levels were put forward and suggestions were tried to be introduced.