In the Name of the National Will: Populist Authoritarianism and the Transformation of Turkish Bureaucracy (2004–2024)

This chapter analyses the interplay between populism and democratic backsliding in Turkey from 2004 to 2024, focusing on how President Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) systematically dismantled the military, civil, and judicial bureaucracies rooted in the Kemalist tradition. Framing bureaucratic tutelage as an ideological threat, Erdoğan leveraged a populist discourse centred on the ‘national will’ to centralise executive power and erode institutional checks and balances. The chapter argues that successive political turning points – such as electoral victories, constitutional referendums, and the suppression of rival factions – paved the way for an authoritarian regime. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of official rhetoric and documents, it situates Turkey’s political-bureaucratic transformation within the broader debates on the limits of Western administrative models in non-Western contexts.