Ranking municipality service criteria by using SWARA method

Local governments are public legal entities established to meet the common needs of the people of provinces, districts, towns, or villages which also have general decision-making units that are elected by the people, and are affected by the socio-economic, cultural, historical, and political structures of the countries. Local governments provide services for the needs, demands, and expectations of the local people. While providing local services, the initial goal is to keep the service satisfaction level of the citizens at the highest level. In this thesis, first of all, concepts such as service, service quality, management, management types, municipality, and municipalism are mentioned. Afterward, AHP, ANP, TOPSIS, VIKOR, PROMETHEE, ARAS, COPRAS, ENTROPY, DEMATEL, and CRITIC, which are MCDM methods, are mentioned. It has been observed that there has not been a study that prioritized municipal services using MCDM before. For this reason, in the application part of this thesis, there is an attempt to determine the level of importance of municipal services and service priority rankings of the individuals who receive services for the district municipality services provided by 39 district municipalities in Istanbul by using the SWARA method, one of the current MCDM methods. Accordingly, the answers received from 1009 people from 39 districts were calculated with the SWARA method, and the priorities of the services were determined. Since it is thought that the level of care which the citizen from many regions of Istanbul may differ according to the demographic features of that certain area, MANOVA and t-test are used to examine whether there are significant differences in terms of rankings. The findings obtained as a result of this thesis study can be used by the municipal authorities to determine which services the citizen expectation is concentrated on and what the demands of the citizens are. In addition, a similar study can be applied to the services provided by the metropolitan municipalities in the future.