Institutionalized bureaucratic coping with democratic backsliding: Regime change and Bureaucratic responses in Turkey

An increasing number of Western liberal democracies have experienced the rise of populist parties that propagate policies that threaten the fundamentals of democracy and the rule of law. One of the key questions there is how the bureaucracy reacts to political changes that bring populists to power through legitimate democratic elections. In established liberal democracies, bureaucrats have no ready-made scenarios to cope with illiberal politicians in such situations. In this paper, we empirically examine and theorize bureaucratic reactions to populist and authoritarian politicians in democracies that have experienced democratic backslides for longer periods. We expect to find that bureaucracies under populist and authoritarian regimes in weak democracies have developed coping strategies to deal with authoritarian incursions and expectations of regime change. To examine bureaucratic responses to democratic backsliding in the context of weak democracies, we focus on the case of Turkey. Turkey experienced a constitutional backsliding after the regime changed from a multi-party parliamentary systems into a ‘strong-man’ presidential system in 2018. The regime change came after a decades long buildup of increasingly authoritarian and illiberal policy measures under the ruling AKP government. As we are interested in this paper in the coping mechanisms of individual bureaucrats and bureaucratic agencies, we will empirically examine the cases of the State Planning Organization and the Social Benefits Agency. We will argue that professionalism and expertise can serve as important shields against authoritarian incursions into bureaucratic autonomy and backsliding in the context of illiberal democracies.