Search

In this thesis, we test the effect of intergovernmental grants on municipal spending in Turkey. In our analysis, we incorporate Turkey's institutional features in modelling local authority behaviour. We give evidence on the results of incorporating dynamic elements into the expenditure equation in order to explain the variation in municipal expenditure. Our findings also throw light on the existence of the flypaper effect in the dynamic estimation. In our analysis, by using the method of the error correction mechanism (ECM), we also measure how quickly local government expenditure adjusts to its long-run growth path following a disturbance. We find that the past year's expenditure has a significant impact on current local expenditure. Our result in this respect contributes to the existing literature which seems to ignore the significant impact of previous expenditure on current local expenditure while estimating the demand for (or determinant of) local expenditure. While identifying avenues for further theoretical and empirical research in the flypaper effect, Bailey and Connolly (1998) suggested that one of the most obvious avenues is the inclusion of dynamic elements into the exclusively static approach. This is in order to take account of time lags in adjusting the supply of local government services to the current demand conditions. An important contribution of this thesis is to satisfy Bailey and Connoly (1998)'s request by including the lagged municipal expenditure as an explanatory variable. We also analyse the grant allocation in Turkey. We test empirically whether central government transfers to the municipalities are made on the basis of economic criteria, or in accordance with the political interest of politicians, and hence the coalition government. We find that equity and efficiency considerations do not appear to motivate the politicians, but neither is grant allocation apparently motivated by the desire to secure re-election.

Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining in American Women’s Life Narratives, 1859-1912, studies three marginalized and disadvantaged American women’s self-life narratives during a transitional period in American history. In this dissertation, I am taking an interdisciplinary approach. Where We Belong borrows from social geography, new materialism, and autobiography studies in order to complicate critical discussions of women’s space and place in nineteenth-century women’s self-life narratives. Each chapter of Where We Belong presents a case study with the goal to provide a broader understanding of women’s strategies of belonging due to and despite their spatial exclusions. The overarching emphasis in each chapter remains on the female body’s spatial movement. Exploring Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), and Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), I claim that material spaces and these women’s corporeal bodies are inseparable. The three cases I present in this project exemplify how marginal women develop strategies of belonging in spaces from which they have been excluded. These women demonstrate ways of belonging (where they are assumed not to) enacted by self-life narratives. Belonging is not a passive way of being: it is activism that disrupts strict categories and definitions, such as blackness, in American literary scholarship. It contains paradoxes of acquiescence and self-declaration.