Thematic analysis of citizen empowerment in the light of upstream documents of the Iranian administrative system

Today, governments alone can not create a role for the effective management of society, and in this regard, the role of citizens as key players in the political and administrative affairs of societies is very important and such a significant role for citizens needs to empowerment them to create new values, Institutionalize citizen participation in policy-making and decision-making at the level of national and local communities. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to explain the main and organizing themes of citizen empowerment. For this purpose, the basic themes of empowering citizens were counted from the text of upstream documents of the Iranian administrative system, including the Constitution, the Charter of Citizenship Rights, the Civil Service Management Law, and the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Development Plans Law. Each of the main themes was explained and then the main themes were assigned to an organizing theme. According to the problem of the present study, the strategy of thematic analysis was used and since in this study we are trying to discover the themes of empowering citizens, the purpose of the research is exploratory and the method of data collection is through study and review of documents. According to the data analysis, 154 initial codes, 38 main themes and eight organizing themes were formed and the research findings were presented in the form of a conceptual model that shows the network relationship between different themes. The results indicate that the empowerment of citizens has multiple dimensions and in order to improve and increase citizen participation in public administration, these multiple dimensions in economic, social, legal, political, environmental, cultural and administrative policies should be considered by policy makers and Public Managers.