E-Municipality Applications in Local Government: A Content Analysis on Metropolitian Municipalities

In Turkish public administration, municipalities have experienced various changes in their organizational structure and place in communal life in parallel with the development and transform of social life. The spatial and communal cohesion between citizens and municipalities position the municipalities as a complementary factor within the central government. These developments, along with the development of information and communication technologies, have brought various administrative problems. Developments in information and communication technologies, especially since the 1980s, have led to radical changes in providing service in public administration. In this direction, in the national sense, e-government application; whereas in the local sense, the e-municipality application plays a vital role in realizing the modern administration approach for effective and efficient service. In the study, the 30 metropolitan municipalities in Turkey were examined by both corporate website applications as well as applications in e-government platform in the content analysis method. In the literature, e-government maturity model and egovernment development stages have been examined together with their titles within the framework of information, interaction, process and integration stages. According to the results, municipalities offer various applications for their respective stakeholders and include these applications with similar names on their corporate web pages. In addition, it is seen that the services for information, interaction and transaction stages are largely provided on corporate web pages; it is noteworthy that the number of municipalities that provide services for interaction and processing on the e-government platform is few.