Administration &Society, Ahead of Print.
Patronage appointments have been a frequently used indicator in order to gauge the level of politicization of bureaucracy in different countries. Studies tend to explain the politicization based on governmental, prime ministerial, or ministerial alternation. By relying upon a unique dataset consisting of 12.832 decisions of appointment to higher echelons in the Turkish bureaucracy during the Justice and Development Party’s uninterrupted one-party governments between 2002 and 2018, this study, however, suggests that the patronage appointments, and thereby politicization of the bureaucracy, might very well have been triggered by the within “power bloc” crisis linked to Turkey’s socio-political conditions.