Does the Governorship Matter for Provincial Economic Development?

ABSTRACT

Appointed provincial governors do not have any power to make new policies apart from the ones made by the central government, but they are legally responsible for their implementations. In addition, they are not appointed for a specific time period and can be rotated even within a year or can stay longer where they are assigned. However, governors are overtly or covertly influential on provincial development since they have the central government’s authority in the local administration. In this respect, using a new panel dataset, the current study seeks to find out if there is a relation between a governor’s length of tenure and provincial economic development. The empirical results of the study show a negative relationship between the length of tenure and the economic development of provinces. In addition, longer tenure years are related to lower economic development, while the too-short length of tenure has no significant impact on the economic development of the provinces.

KEYWORDS:

• Provincial governorship
• local administration
• length of tenure
• economic development
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Once parliamentarian political system has been changed for Presidential system in Turkey, the president of Turkey gained the right to promulgate presidential decree without ratification of the parliament. Regarding to the scope of the paper, the Presidency Decree of No 3 which has been enforced in 10/07/2018 specified the minimum requirement and tenure of high-ranking officials including gubernatorial office.

2. At the request of an anonymous referee, we estimated whether there is a non-linear relationship between governors’ terms of office and policy outcomes in the provinces of Turkey. This estimation also aims to catch if the non-linear relationship between tenure in the office and economic development seen in the study of Zhang and Gao (2008) on China also exists in Turkey. Figures A1 and A2 in the appendix show that the relationship between the terms of office of governors and economic development is linear in Turkey.