Which Citizens Solicit Street-Level Bureaucrats and Why? Insights from Turkey’s Muhtars

EasyChair Preprint 13720

Abstract

Muhtars (headmen) in Turkey are elected frontline workers operating at a very local level—that of a neighborhood or village. Their specificity is strong social and local embeddedness. The people they administrate are at the same time their neighbors and constituents. Besides, their work is organized in a much less bureaucratic manner than that of other frontline workers. Muhtars are not specialized but operate in several domains - mostly administrative work, social assistance, and service delivery. While most administrative procedures can be implemented both at muhtars’ offices and in other administrations - and sometimes online -, many people still turn to muhtars. Therefore, turning to these street-level workers is a choice by the users. Not all citizens make use of the muhtars to the same extent or in the same way. The paper therefore analyses which citizens tend to solicit the muhtar, and in which instances. Disadvantaged groups—be it economically, socially, or culturally—solicit muhtars more frequently. Interestingly, they turn to them with all kinds of requests - including for issues for which muhtars have no official responsibility. The paper then questions why these residents make such broad use of muhtars. First, muhtars come across as being more accessible than other officials. This is certainly linked to their closeness to, and dependency on residents for reelection. Second, citizens expect muhtars to stray from the official precepts supposedly guiding them – much more than what Lipsky described for street-level work requiring ‘responsiveness to the individual case’ (Lipsky 1980/2010: XII). It is commonly believed that in Turkish administration, nothing works according to the rules, and that intercession proves crucial (Secor, 2007; Yoltar, 2007). Most citizens turn to muhtars expecting them to intercede with institutions on their behalf. Soliciting street-level workers often appears as attempts to bypass official rules (Massicard, 2022).

Keyphrases: Frontline work, Intercession, Intermediary, Qualitative work, Social uses, Turkey, disadvantaged groups, embeddedness, interviews, observation, users

@booklet{EasyChair:13720,
  author    = {Elise Massicard},
  title     = {Which Citizens Solicit Street-Level Bureaucrats and Why? Insights from Turkey’s Muhtars},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 13720},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}