E-Governance as Authoritarian Infrastructure: Hybrid Repression and the Reporting Ecosystem in Turkey

Denunciations sharply increased in Turkey in recent years, turning reporting into a routinized civic practice with severe consequences for those targeted, including dismissals, administrative sanctions, and criminal investigations. Denunciations are submitted through a mechanism that converges legal, bureaucratic, and technological tools. At its centre lies the Presidential Communication Centre (CİMER), a hyper-centralized petitioning platform that absorbs millions of citizen submissions annually. Building on the Turkish case, this paper pursues a dual objective: first, it conceptualizes e-governance as a distinct component of digital authoritarian infrastructure; second, it examines how this infrastructure functions within a hybrid reporting ecosystem, enabling forms of repression that erode the boundary between the digital and the physical. In doing so, the paper theorizes the broader reporting ecosystem as the milieu in which online and offline authoritarian practices intersect and reinforce each other. Scholarship on digital authoritarianism has largely concentrated on consolidated autocracies such as China and Russia, where coercive digital practices take the form of censorship, friction, flooding, disinformation, propaganda, and data-driven surveillance. The Turkish case illustrates a different trajectory that extends technology-driven playbooks for authoritarian rule: the weaponization of a seemingly democratic e-governance instrument, CİMER, to restructure how citizens interact with the state. Turkey’s petitioning system functions as a catalyst within a multi-layered reporting ecosystem in which analogue complaint channels, sector-specific digital applications, and CİMER operate in tandem. Rather than constituting a purely digital repertoire, these channels form an integrated infrastructure through which routine reporting and denunciation activate offline investigations, sanctions, and long-term chilling effects. As a tool of e-governance, CİMER simultaneously solves the regime’s information problem, co-opts citizens by offering problem-solving and direct executive access, and outsources surveillance to ordinary individuals whose monitoring extends into everyday social interactions. Drawing on legal and policy analysis, platform observation, and expert interviews with legal professionals, civil servants, and trade unionists, the paper empirically maps the operational logic of this hybrid ecosystem and analyses it through the five-element framework proposed by Roberts and Oosterom (2024). The Turkish case demonstrates that authoritarian repression is co-produced by state institutions and ordinary citizens (actors), mediated by technologies that blend bureaucratic procedures with digital affordances (technology), through practices of reporting and surveillance (act). These practices generate immediate consequences for those denounced (first-order effects) while consolidating political power through repression, cooptation, and legitimation (second-order effects). This perspective moves beyond state-centred or technology-determinist accounts. It highlights how analogue and digital modalities are interwoven to expand both the reach and the perceived legitimacy of coercive governance. We found that digital authoritarianism takes a distinct form when institutions that claim transparency, responsiveness, and civic engagement are weaponized to outsource surveillance to citizens and elicit denunciations. Participation is solicited not through overt coercion but through the language of democratic duty, access, and administrative efficiency, giving state surveillance a façade of participatory governance. By theorizing e-governance as authoritarian infrastructure and empirically tracing its hybrid effects, the paper advances conceptual and methodological tools for examining the interplay of digital and physical repression in hybrid regimes.