The importance of public relations in local goverments: The example of Konya Metropolitan Municipality

This research was conducted to emphasize the importance of public relations understandingin Turkish Local Governments and to reveal the impact of this situation. In countries governed by democratic methods, local methods, especially municipalities, have a management approach that is responsible and respecful to the public, and at the same time, there is an effort to gain the trust and support of the public in order to successfully perfom the duties for which they are responsible. The phenomenon of "public relations" comes to the fore in order to maket he adminisrative functioning effective at the level of meeting the expectations of the citizens at the point where the determined goal is to be achieved and, as a result, to relaize the adequacy of the services. With today's understanding of local government, the quality of life of the citizens and the quality of the services provied to maket his effective become more important for the municipalities as they gain public saticfaction. In this study, the methods, techniques and data studies carried out within the process of the importance of public relations in local governments were used. Citizens are the decision-making parties in the research contucted to measure the degree of services provied by municipalities.Citizens expectations and demands may differ according to each person's wishes. These expectations vary according to the educational level, income level, gender, age and marital status of the people participating in the research. In this study, a face-to-face survey with Convenience Sampling was used as a method, and it was carried out on 384 associations with egual distribution in the three largest districts of Konya, Selçuklu, Meram and Karatay, in order to measure the expectations and satisfaction level of the people.With the results obtained from the study. It shows that the young population living with Ent is less satisfied than the population with a higher age group and the group with a higher income group is more satisfied than the participants with a lower income group. The inference obtainded here shows that the activities performed are not egual and new studies should be contucted on this subject.