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In divided-executive patronal systems, legislatures have been sites of resistance to the centralization of power in a single patronal pyramid. Kyrgyzstan is an anomaly among divided-executive patronal systems when between 2010 to 2020, the Kyrgyz parliament was neither a site of opposition nor did it demonstrate legislative agency vis-à-vis the executive. Instead, following another uprising in 2020, a unified single patronal pyramid was re-established. Adopting an approach rooted in the semiotics of meaning making and drawing on a dataset of interviews with parliamentary deputies and a range of documentary sources, this article complements existing institutional approaches to explaining weak legislative agency by revealing a series of dialogical relationships between deputy meaning making and broader institutional and cultural constraints which shaped the Kyrgyz's parliament's overall quality and strength. These relationships pertain to legislative initiative, the protection of private interests and representation, with the interplay between the ascribed meaning and its constitution within broader institutional and cultural context contributing to the diminishment of legislative agency vis-à-vis the presidency. Kyrgyzstan illustrates the value of meaning making as an approach to understanding legislative-executive relations in non-democratic contexts, and its impact in conjunction with cultural and institutional constraints in shaping legislative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the political subjectivity of hipsters in Kazakhstan, the dynamics of their political mobilization, how they are influenced by global flows, and their constitution within broader issues of class. By conceptualizing hipsters as cultural hybrids who use tactics of everyday resistance and détournement in challenging the authoritarian regime in the country, the work eschews conventional approaches to the study of political mobilization in Central Asia by looking beyond ethnic, religious, and informal movements and instead focusing on this new creative class. The analysis reveals the paradox of hipsters in that they both challenge the regime through détournement, while also being the main beneficiaries of the regime’s neoliberalism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people in Kazakhstan, the essay finds that hipster capacity for successful mobilization is limited because they struggle to draw support from wider society as a consequence of their focus on ideational rather than material politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do political parties play in Central Asian authoritarianism? Typically understood as being irrelevant, this article argues to the contrary that parties play an important role in the mosaic of authoritarian rule via the articulation of private interests. Examining Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan this study identifies two models of party interest articulation: a leveraging model where a party is utilized to protect the financial and political interests of elites; and a coordinating model where a party serves to integrate presidential assets. Neither model is uniform and party dynamics are dependent upon the specific nature of each personalist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vladimir Putin's United Russia and Nursultan Nazabayev's Nur Otan represent a distinctive type of dominant party due to their personalist nature and dependence on their presidential patrons. Such personalism deprives these parties of the agency to perform key roles in authoritarian reproduction typically expected of dominant parties, such as resource distribution, policy-making and mobilizing mass support for the regime. Instead United Russia and Nur Otan have contributed to authoritarian consolidation by securing the president's legislative agenda, stabilizing elites to ensure their patron's hold on power, and assisting in perpetuating a discourse around the national leader. However, because these parties lack the agency to reproduce themselves, to entrench their position, and to play more than a supportive role in regime consolidation, the lifespan of such personalist dominant parties is likely to be significantly shorter than that of dominant parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the genesis and influence of informal politics on non-democratic outcomes in Central Asia. As opposed to current scholarship which explains the emergence of informal politics as a result of kinship-based cultural legacies, this work uses the broader analytical framework of neopatrimonialism to understand informal political phenomena while emphasizing the role of uncertainty and contingent actor choice in explaining its appearance. The article also assesses how informal political behaviour (patronage and patron-client relations) was used to consolidate authoritarianism. Using Kazakhstan's (1990-95) early transition period as a case study this article notes how three processes central to transition (institutional conflict, emerging pluralism, and electoral competition) elicited a degree of uncertainty which destabilized prior institutional equilibrium. The president of Kazakhstan applied informal forms of politics to manage this uncertainty to re-assert his power and consolidate his personal authoritarian rule at the expense of emerging democratic institutions. The article illustrates how the uncertain and contingent process of transition is instrumental to the emergence of informal politics and the durability of authoritarianism in Kazakhstan, and that informal political relations and behaviour are important to understanding non-democratic and democratic paths in former Soviet states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]