Delegation of Political Authority to Bureaucratic Agencies in an Authoritarian Regime: Analysis of Regional Economic Regulation in Kazakhstan.

This paper investigates the delegation of economic policy implementation in non- democratic settings using the example of Kazakhstan. It draws on a newly assembled dataset of statutory and administrative regulation created between 1991 and 2011 in Kazakhstan in order to investigate political sources and economic effects of the political micromanagement of bureaucracy. The analysis examines regional and temporal vari- ation in the number and detail of economic regulations and finds that while regulatory intervention negatively affects economic performance in the private sector, detailed regulations that constrain bureaucratic discretion have a positive affect. This finding supports the notion that in the absence of societal accountability, political microman- agement of the administrative apparatus leads to better institutional performance and a more stable business climate. The paper explicates the ways in which theories of delegation apply to non-democratic political realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]