The Hyper-Unitary Executive: Lessons From a Backsliding Democracy

By: Doruk Erhan

PDF: The Hyper-Unitary Executive

This Article foregrounds the civil bureaucracy as a

central yet overlooked site of democratic backsliding. While

authoritarian shifts are conventionally associated with the

weakening of interbranch checks and balances, this Article

focuses on a single branch—the executive—and identifies its

internal remaking as a key explanatory variable. It examines

the gradual erosion of a sub-constitutional separation of

powers, which in ordinary times, distributes authority

between career civil servants and their political superiors,

namely, presidents, prime ministers, cabinet officials, and

political appointees. The core thesis is that the systematic

dismantling of this intra-branch equilibrium has been a quiet

yet profound driver of democratic decline across jurisdictions

and political contexts. This Article introduces the hyper-

unitary executive to capture the form the executive function

takes once this dismantling is complete—that is, when the

civil bureaucracy is reduced to an at-will workforce and the

political executive exercises near-total control over agency

structures, personnel decisions, and day-to-day enforcement

actions.

To illustrate this model and explore its democratic costs,

this Article provides a detailed account of Turkey’s descent

into competitive authoritarianism under the two-decade rule

of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development

Party (AKP). Drawing on socio-legal analysis and

synthesizing insights from a broad range of social science

scholarship, this Article identifies two key mechanisms of

hyper-unification: (1) loyalty-based appointments and

removals and (2) sweeping statutory changes that centralize

and insulate these powers. These mechanisms, arguably, were

part of a deliberate strategy of partisan entrenchment, one

that has not only weakened state capacity but also reshaped

the background conditions of political competition in favor of

the ruling alliance. Today, this alliance—a narrow cadre of

political elites centered around Erdoğan—effectively dictates

which media outlets may operate, what speech is permissible,

and who secures government contracts and public-sector

positions. Turkey’s story, thus, holds broader lessons. It not

only provides a diagnostic lens for hyper-unitarist tendencies

elsewhere but also reveals why the promise of restoring

popular control and “draining the swamp” is, in the end, a

self-serving illusion.