Legalised Fiscal Deviation and Data Fragmentation in Social Protection Systems: Evidence From Turkey

Fiscal narratives about social protection in middle‐income countries—chronic underfunding and unsustainable institutional deficits—shape reform agendas and constrain policy choices. This article argues that such narratives can be systematically misleading, not because they misread the evidence, but because the evidence itself is produced by fragmented governance structures that prevent coherent fiscal measurement. When institutional fragmentation prevents the integration of administrative data across social protection actors, the indicators used to assess adequacy and sustainability become artefacts of classification choices rather than accurate descriptions of the system. The consequences for policy are direct: reform agendas may be structured around fiscal problems that do not exist in the form presented, while genuine governance failures remain invisible. Drawing on four institutional data sources covering Turkey's social protection system over 2002–2025—TURKSTAT's ESSPROS statistics, central government budget records, Social Security Institution (SGK) financial accounts and disaggregated budget execution data—this article provides the first systematic decomposition of budget transfers to Turkey's SGK. The findings demonstrate that social protection expenditure remained stable at 9%–11% of GDP throughout 2008–2025, that contribution revenues financed 70%–79% of SGK expenditures after 2015, and that the fiscal burden narrative surrounding the institution rests on indicators that conflate actuarial obligations with deliberate policy instruments—a form of legalised fiscal deviation sustained by governance fragmentation. The article contributes to debates on fiscal governance, democratic accountability and evidence‐based welfare state reform, and develops a governance capacity framework applicable to middle‐income countries with fragmented social protection architectures.