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Since the end of the civil war, Sri Lanka has increasingly drifted toward a competitive authoritarianism, representing a cumulative outcome of the executive presidential system. The concentration of power in the executive presidency has progressively weakened the legislature, judiciary, and civil service, rendering the public administration subservient to political authority. This article, thus, examines how competitive authoritarianism – entrenched through constitutional engineering and political manoeuvring – has eroded Sri Lanka's democratic public administrative system, a topic that has received limited scholarly attention among South Asian scholars. The 1978 Constitution and subsequent constitutional amendments institutionalized competitive authoritarianism by centralizing authority in the hands of the Executive President, thereby dismantling the independence of the civil service and other key accountability institutions. The article contends that the executive presidency empowered successive leaders to manipulate governance mechanisms, undermine watchdog institutions, and weaken the accountability framework, ultimately subverting both public administration and democratic norms. Thus, Sri Lanka serves as a critical test case for understanding how an executive presidential system can contribute to democratic backsliding and the deterioration of a public administration originally established during the British colonial period as an impartial, legitimate, rational, and rule-based system.
Ramasamy et al. (Wed,) studied this question.