Turkey

Turkey's 2017 constitutional referendum transformed the parliamentary system into an executive presidency, concentrating powers that were previously distributed across prime minister, president, and parliament into a single office. President Erdogan controls judicial appointments, can issue decrees with the force of law, and faces no effective parliamentary check — a structural shift that replaces institutional friction with executive speed. The economy operates in a permanent tension between orthodox monetary policy and Erdogan's heterodox insistence that high interest rates cause inflation — a position that conventional economics rejects. The lira lost over 80% of its value against the dollar between 2018 and 2023, demonstrating the cost of overriding institutional expertise with political conviction. Turkey's geographic position — bridging Europe and Asia, controlling Black Sea access through the Bosphorus — gives it leverage disproportionate to its economic weight, allowing it to extract concessions from both NATO allies and non-aligned states. The governance model is a dominance hierarchy: speed and decisiveness when the leader reads the environment correctly, catastrophic error accumulation when they don't.