The relationship between service satisfaction and voter orientation in municipalities: The case of Sancaktepe Municipality

Municipalities are local government units organized to meet common local needs. In this context, the main duties of municipalities are to provide local public services. In line with the New Public Management (YKİ) approach that has dominated public administration practices in recent years, a customer-oriented management approach has become dominant in local services. The ultimate aim in new public management is to increase the satisfaction level of customers with the services to the highest point. Customers (citizens) who are satisfied with the service will tend to continue to support the service they receive and will use their preference as voters in this direction. So, really, how do local customers (voters) decide on who and how to deliver public services? What are the factors affecting voter behavior in the local level? Do voters tend to vote for the existing administration to the extent that they are satisfied with the service, as the new public management suggests? According to the literature on voter behavior, three main approaches come to the fore: (a) sociological model, (b) psychological model, (c) rational choice model. Models of such voter behavior mostly focus on general elections and as mentioned above, focus on measuring the effects of different factors on voter behavior. The purpose of the thesis study is to investigate to what extent and in what way the satisfaction levels of the services provided by the municipality affect the voters' political preferences in the municipal elections. In line with this purpose, firstly, the generally accepted arguments in the literature were scanned and the aforementioned arguments were tested with the field study conducted in Sancaktepe Municipality in Istanbul. In the field research, a questionnaire was applied to 500 people. With the field research, data on the relationship between local voter behavior and service satisfaction were collected and generally accepted arguments were tested based on the data. According to the results of the research, it was observed that voters do not tend to vote according to service satisfaction in local elections, on the contrary, sociological and / or ideological approaches direct voter behavior.