Innovating Authoritarian Control: Digital Governance in Türkiye

This presentation analyzes Türkiye as a case of authoritarian innovation in the digital era, drawing explicitly on comparative political science theories of authoritarianism, governance, and state power. Anchored in the literature on authoritarian adaptation and resilience (Levitsky and Way, 2010; Gerschewski, 2013), electoral authoritarianism, and rule by law, the presentation argues that digital governance has become a key institutional arena through which authoritarian control is recalibrated rather than imposed through overt repression. The theoretical framework conceptualizes digital governance as an extension of the state’s infrastructural power (Mann, 1984), exercised through legal and regulatory institutions rather than coercive force alone. Building on governance-based accounts of power, the presentation shows how law and regulation function as political instruments that structure compliance, uncertainty, and self-discipline. This perspective situates digital authoritarianism within broader debates on hybrid regimes, where formal democratic institutions coexist with systematic constraints on political competition and civil liberties. The presentation examines Türkiye’s digital governance architecture since the late 2017s, including social media legislation, intermediary liability regimes, data localization requirements, and the expanded authority of regulatory agencies over digital platforms. Drawing on legislative analysis, court rulings, and emblematic enforcement cases, it demonstrates how these mechanisms enable selective repression. Political opposition, journalists, and civil society actors are disproportionately targeted, while uneven enforcement produces uncertainty that incentivizes anticipatory compliance by platforms and users alike. This pattern aligns with political science theories of authoritarian control through discretion and institutional ambiguity. The presentation argues that Türkiye represents a distinct variant of digital authoritarianism characterized by governance-based control rather than comprehensive technological surveillance or blanket censorship. Unlike centralized digital authoritarian models, the Turkish case relies on legal ambiguity, negotiated platform compliance, and institutional fragmentation to incrementally narrow the digital public sphere while preserving electoral competition and procedural legality. By embedding digital authoritarianism within established political science theory, the presentation contributes to comparative debates on how authoritarian regimes innovate under conditions of institutional constraint. It demonstrates that digital authoritarianism should be understood not simply as technologically enabled repression, but as a politically structured governance project that reshapes state–society relations through law, regulation, and administrative power.