Revisiting the Historical Evolution of Central-Local Government Relations: Legacies, Transformations and Future Trajectories in Türkiye’s Urban Politics

This article revisits Melih Ersoy’s diagnosis of a Centralist-Authoritarian-Paternalist (CAP) character in Türkiye’s central—local government relations, reinterpreting it through Jessop’s strategic-relational approach, Brenner’s state spatial restructuring, and Peck, Theodore and Brenner’s account of crisis-driven neoliberalization. We conceptualize the CAP character not as a transhistorical constant but as a path-dependent pattern of crisis-driven reconstitution, destabilized at each major conjuncture and re-established through qualitatively new and increasingly coercive instruments. Employing comparative-historical institutional analysis, we take İstanbul and Ankara as critical cases and, drawing on Baudner’s typology of institutional layering, informal-rule dominance, and displacement, periodize the post-1994 trajectory into four phases: bureaucratic tutelage under coalition fragmentation (1994–2001); formal decentralization paralleled by central-agency layering (2002–2010); systematized trustee appointments and deepened oversight (2011–2018); and concurrent fiscal encirclement and judicial—political interventions targeting opposition metropolises (2019–present). The analysis foregrounds how opposition municipalities, the Kurdish political movement, and urban social mobilizations have contested centralization from below, progressively raising its political cost. Three recurrent mechanisms emerge: scalar reorganization of spatial planning; fiscal gatekeeping; and political—judicial curtailment of elected authority. The conclusion identifies institutional reform directions through which the CAP cycle might be interrupted, offering a conceptual template for analysing central—local dynamics in other authoritarian contexts across the Global South.