Social media use of local governments and local participation in Turkey: An analysis on the Twitter accounts of metropolitan municipalities

Thanks to the instant and bi-directional communication and interaction it offers, social media has become one of the primary platforms used by public institutions to communicate with citizens and ensure citizen participation in public policies. Twitter is one of the priority platforms used for this purpose and function. It is obvious that local governments, which are responsible for meeting the local common needs of the local people, also use Twitter to ensure public participation in public policies, in terms of ease of access for both institutions and the public. This study examines the social media use of Turkey's metropolitan municipalities, in providing the public participation to public policies, particularly on the scope of Twitter. In this respect, in the first part of the study, the picture of transformation of local governments in Turkey from past to today is drawn. In the second part of the study, the subject of local participation is discussed in depth. The theories related to local participation, the dimensions and types of local participation are also investigated in this part, citing the references from Turkey and the world. In the third part of the study, the relationship between social media and local participation is presented with various sub-topics. The stages of development of the and social media use of local governments in the function of public participation are covered in this part. In the fourth part of the study, a research based on a content analysis is included. In the research, a total of 39.972 tweets that were shared by the metropolitan municipalities in previous year are subjected to this content analysis. As a result of the analysis, those related to public participation were taken as a separate focus, examined in depth, and discussed from the perspective of related theories in discussion title, while it was detected for what purposes the metropolitan municipalities in question used social media. According to the results of the study, metropolitan municipalities use Twitter mostly for corporate information purposes, and in the public participation dimension, they mostly use the function of ensuring participation by communicating with citizens and actors. Keywords: Public Participation, Twitter, Metropolitan Municipalities, Turkey, Local Government