Youth participation in local politics: city councils and youth assemblies in Turkey

Abstract

The focus of this study is political participation of youth in local politics in Turkey. Since local politics includes elements from both macro politics and mundane affairs, it proves to be a fertile ground to analyse how youth experience politics. Youth participation in local politics became an important issue in Turkey with the Agenda 21. The Agenda 21 that was launched with the UN Rio Summit was transferred to Turkey in the form of Local Agenda 21 leading to the establishment of city councils and youth assemblies under the umbrella of the councils. We treat city councils and youth assemblies as ‘a lost opportunity’ for now, and we ask why the youth cannot be integrated into local politics, despite the fact that they are willing to participate. Based on the interviews conducted with the members of assemblies, we try to understand the factors that lead to young people’s engagement in political life.

Keywords:

• Turkey
• local politics
• city councils
• youth assemblies
• youth participation
• youth

Acknowledgements

We thank all of the members of the youth assembly for sharing their experience candidly with us. We would also like to extend special thanks to Sezai Hazır and all of the employees of Habitat.

Notes

1. In a follow-up article, after 15 years, Putnam has also observed such a trend which he explained with the rising interest among youth to politics and public affairs after experiencing 9/11 (Sander and Putnam 2010). They argue Obama’s presidential campaign has managed to mobilize this newly engaged youth by combining new technologies of communication, twitter and Facebook with classic organizing techniques. However, they see that this trend is limited to the middle class, well-educated and mostly white youngsters, and the question remains whether this type of engagement would include other social classes and age groups as well.

2. The results presented here belong to the Civic Education Study conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement in 2001, as a part of a research programme of developing a comparative framework of the youth’s perception of civic values as well as textbook content of these issues and teaching methods. In this regard, they conducted a survey on ‘samples of 14-year-olds in 28 countries regarding their knowledge of civic-related content, their skills in understanding political communication, their concepts of and attitudes toward civics, and their participation or practices in this area’ (Torney-Purta et al. 2001).

3. PIDOP was a multinational research project that was funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Program. The project examined the processes which influence democratic ownership and participation in nine European countries – Belgium, the Czech Republic, England, Germany, Italy, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey.