Digital transformation of public services as state transformation: an overview of the experience in Turkey during the pandemic

Abstract

This paper discusses the contextual aspects of the digital transformation of the Turkish public administration system during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the accelerating process of the digitalization of public services during the pandemic should be understood in connection with the ongoing, broader transformation of the Turkish state into the neoliberal regulatory state that has been ideologically framed as a facilitator of market-led economic development. This argument is based on the “state transformation approach” developed as an alternative analytical tool to address governance outcomes as a manifestation of neoliberally informed shifts in the location of state power, in the groups of actors that exercise state power, and in the ideas used to rationalize the exercise of it.