The Role of Parliamentary Audit Committees as a Medium of Political Oversight: The Case of Istanbul District Municipalities

Municipalities, which are part of the superstructure called the state, can be audited by a number of mechanisms in various aspects, such as whether they carry out their activities in accordance with the duties and powers given to them by law, whether they prefer appropriate means to achieve the determined objectives, whether they use the means and resources in accordance with the law. Political audit, which is one of these mechanisms, is a type of audit carried out by municipal councils in order to ensure whether the organisation and execution of municipal activities are carried out in accordance with the law. However, this oversight relationship between the legislature and the executive may not be functional depending on the weight of the political groups in the parliament due to the way the commission is formed. Based on this problematic situation, the aim of this paper is to reveal how functional parliamentary audit commissions are as a tool of political control in municipal assemblies. In this paper, interviews were conducted with a total of 12 council members working in three district municipalities, two different municipalities where one political group is concentrated in the parliament and one municipality where political groups are close to each other, which were determined by using a purposive sampling approach among the municipalities in Istanbul, which constitute the universe. The interviews were analysed by thematic analysis method and the data obtained were interpreted in accordance with the purpose of the paper. One of the main findings of the paper is that when the mayor and the majority of the members of the commission are from the same party, it is not possible to get out of the party will, and therefore, real and effective decisions cannot be taken in the commission works.