Paperwork as statecraft: documents, politics, and bureaucratic agency in street-level organisations

Abstract

Are bureaucratic institutions simply hollowed-out instruments of autocratisation, meaning they merely execute the orders of ­populist-authoritarian actors? If not, how do they deal with the destabilisations of autocratisation? Drawing on a study of street-level bureaucracies in contemporary Turkey, this article contributes to ongoing debates on the (un)makings of autocratisation and its limits through its focus on the role played by documents in everyday bureaucratic praxis. The findings highlight that bureaucracies do not simply operate in a top-down manner with bureaucrats having little to no space for manoeuvre. On the contrary, documents generate ambiguities and anxieties that civil servants strategically deploy through their incessant translations, negotiations, subversion, countercurrents, contestations and resistances to constrain and rebuke autocratisation. In doing so, the article demonstrates the limits of autocratisation in Turkey, and traces how such large-scale transformations are experienced from within state institutions, and how they unlock the agentive potential for the stakeholders, such as bureaucrats. The article challenges conventional discussions across political science through its attendance to the countercurrents and resistance from within the state, rendering the state not as a coherent, homogeneous entity but more as an incessantly rearticulated relationality. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.