Paying for patronage: Regime change in post-Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan).

摘要

In contrasting the political trajectories of two post-Soviet Central Asian states this study addresses one of the defining questions of political science: what factors shape regime change? Despite their shared seven decades of Soviet rule, Kazakhstan has, since communism's collapse, remained steadfastly authoritarian while Kyrgyzstan has wavered between democracy and autocracy. Using new qualitative data and quantitative analyses of public opinion surveys, the dissertation investigates potential explanations for both this cross case and within case Kyrgyz and Kazakh regime variation. While the dissertation confirms that, consistent with the institutionalist literature on political change, past legacies influence future political outcomes, comparative analysis reveals the salience of these legacies is not guaranteed, but rather, is dependent on a much more immediate political economy of regime change. In particular, the Kazakh and Kyrgyz cases demonstrate that Soviet practices of illiberal rule persist only when post-Soviet states have access to economic resources with which to maintain these methods of illiberal rule.; Using data gathered at the local and national levels and reflective of over a decade of post-Soviet regime change, the dissertation finds that two time-proven Soviet-era institutions developed for co-opting and intimidating political elites have been central to Kazakhstan's steady maintenance and Kyrgyzstan's later resurrection of uncontested authoritarian rule: (1) hierarchical patronage networks and (2) a predatory judicial system. These institutions of elite control, funded by Moscow during communist rule, have been financed by new actors in the post-Soviet period---by early arriving oil investors in Kazakhstan and by considerably later arriving and potentially more skittish foreign aid donors in Kyrgyzstan. These temporal and qualitative differences in outside funding, rather than the sudden resurgence of clan-, Islam- or regional-based identities, are what account for regime variation in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Empirically and theoretically, then, this study advances the causally prior nature of political economy variables in constructing theories of regime change. Additionally, the dissertation modifies the current political economy literature on regime change by establishing that not only natural resources such as oil, but, paradoxically, also well-intentioned Western foreign aid can be applied to illiberal political ends.