Studying the Level of Neighborhood Councilor's Participatory Representation; Comparing  Yousef- Abaad Neighborhood Councilors Opinions with Stakeholders

Participation is of the processes of democratic citizenship and has become one of the remarkable topics of urban policy. Citizen participation is deemed more important in lower levels of local government like city regions and neighborhoods. This paper studies the participatory representation of a neighborhood council in Tehran along four dimensions of informative, consultative, decisional and executive. Interviews with all the 10 councilors and a survey of 338 neighborhood stakeholders were carried out. Findings suggest that the councilors evaluate the informative and decisional dimensions as low but they assess their consultative dimension as average and the executive dimension as high, whereas the stakeholders evaluate every four dimensions as low. In light of these results, the council’s need to revise its participatory policies might become clear.