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The article discusses local government in Europe and Turkey, the European Union (EU) pattern of decentralization in government, and Turkey's halting moves to mimic that as a precursor to EU membership. Topics discussed include: Europeanization, the process whereby EU candidates adapt their institutions and administrative cultures to more closely resemble those of EU member states; the historic association in Europe of decentralized government with greater democracy; the history in Turkey of a unitary central government, and the consequent resistance to decentralization among some political elites.

This article aims to analyse the relationship between Europeanization and administrative reform within the context of recent developments in Turkey. While doing this, the analytical tools of sociological institutionalism and the misfit model of Europeanization are utilized together with the analysis of related legal documents and in-depth interviews conducted with the actors in various tiers of administration. The article argues that institutional change entails a change in values and discourses of the political actors and in the Turkish case, despite the EU's pressures for administrative reform and the resulting legal changes of the 2000s, because of the institutionalized powers and resistance of the actors at the central level no institutional change has occurred in Turkey regarding the administrative system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the significance of the "Cyprus question" in Turkish politics in terms of the interplay between international political developments and the domestic political situation and among domestic political actors. The main focus of the study is the restructuring of Turkey's policy towards Cyprus with the establishment of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. In order to analyze this restructuring process, the study deals with international factors such as the improvement of Turkey's image in the international arena, Turkey's EU membership process, and past foreign policy choices of Turkey, as well as with the impact of changing domestic political alignments and the power struggle among the Turkish political elite, with a special focus on the latter. The main conclusion drawn from the analysis is the fact that the restructuring of Turkey's policy towards Cyprus was not only a matter of foreign policy but was also a means for the AKP to strengthen its domestic position vis-à-vis the other major political actors in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]