Due to the establishment of a new public administration understanding in the international environment, particularly in the USA and the Anglo-Saxon world, a highly comprehensive literature had been accumulated on measuring the individual and institu-tional performances in the public sector. Recently, there have been also a proliferation of the empirical studies that were testing these theoretical assumptions in different re-gions and countries. Even though the literature on the local governments and local gov-ernment budgeting in Turkey is substantially advanced and comprehensive, since the leg-islation of the No: 5018 Law on the performance administration in the public administra-tion the number of the empirical works on the performance indicators of local govern-ments had been quite limited. This work, starting from this void, aims to test two hypoth-eses on Turkish case. Firstly, what is the impact of the qualifications of the mayors (edu-cation, experience) and the support that the mayor possesses on the budgetary perfor-mance of the municipality? Secondly, through following the political budget cycle litera-ture, do the mayors in Turkey opts for policy changes for maximising votes before elec-tions. In order to test these two hypotheses a comprehensive data set was established taking into consideration 81 metropolitan municipalities between 2012-2020. Our find-ings demonstrate, there was not a meaningful relation between the mayors’ qualifications and institutional performances. Nevertheless, there is an important impact of the effect of the year before the local elections and the central government support on the balance of the municipality budget. Therefore, this work, can make a substantial contribution to the literature through the extensive data and findings that it presents