This study is concerned with exploring the relationship between informal forms of political behaviour and relations and the development of formal institutions in post Soviet Central Asian states as a way to explain the development of authoritarianism in the region. It moves the debate on from current scholarship which places primacy on either formal or informal politics in explaining modem political development in Central Asia, by examining the relationship between the two. It utilises Kazakhstan as a case study by assessing how the neopatrimonial system evident in the country has influenced and shaped the development of political parties. It investigates how personalism of political office, patronage and patron-client networks and factional elite conflict have influenced and shaped the institutional constraints affecting party development (institutional choice, electoral design and party law), the type of parties emerging (organisation, ideology and membership) and parties' relationship with society.

This thesis explores the endeavours of the Republic of Kazakhstan la 'create Kazakhstanis.' It starts from the puzzle that the newly-independent, multiethnic country did not experience the kind of interethnic violence and disintegration that were expected during the 19905, although it has not developed an overarching, state-framed 'Kazakhstani' national identity that was deemed necessary by both the Kazakhstani government and the Western literature in order to bridge ethnic divisions, consolidate the polity and prevent disintegration. As Kazakhstan has not fulfilled the dire predict ions, this thesis looks at what has happened instead, asks what Kazakhstani nation-making has looked like, what it has sought to achieve and where it has failed. The two foci are therefore the politics and policies of official nation-making in Kazakhstan and the limitations and problems to these programmes. This analysis is important because it highlights the constraints and paradoxes of nation-making and demonstrates that states can sometimes be 'nationalising' in contradictory ways. The research puzzle is addressed through three main mechanisms. These are the history and historiography of Kazakhstan, the policies and rhetoric of its key political players, and the 'ethnic' grievances that have been expressed outside the ruling circles. The primary data analysed in this work has been generated during ethnographic fieldwork including overt participant observation, documentary research and qualitative elite interviews in seven different regions of Kazakhstan in 2009 and 2010. Overall, the thesis makes four arguments. First, national identity construction in Kazakhstan is a continuation of dialectical Soviet practices, resulting in two nations currently being constructed, an 'ethnic' and a 'civic ' one, of which the ethnic Kazakh is the stronger project. Second, this implies that the Kazakhs are constructed as the country's 'hosts' on whose 'hospitality' other, non-Kazakh Kazakhstanis depend. Third, a parallel, conspicuous celebration of the country's multiethnic character, officially designed to keep the country inter-ethnically 'harmonious,' breaks up the population into sub-state ethnic entities that are well manageable for the regime. Fourth, these combined tactics do not currently develop a new 'civic' Kazakhstani nation, but gradually erode a Soviet-inherited and even pre-Soviet-inherited cultural homogeneity and overarching collective identity.

This thesis consists of two objectives which divide it into two parts. Thus, part one explores the cyclicity of protest mobilisation in post-Soviet Kazakhstan in the 1992–2009 period and part two investigates the relationship between protest mobilisation and democratisation in the 1990s, a decade marked by early progress in democratisation followed by an abrupt reversal to authoritarianism. Acknowledging the existence of numerous competing explanations of protest cyclicity, the first part of this study utilises four major social movement perspectives – relative deprivation (RD), resource mobilisation (RMT), political opportunity structures (POS) and collective action frames (CAF) – to explain variances in protest mobilisation in Kazakhstan over time and four issue areas. Adopting a small-N case study and process-tracing technique, the thesis’s first research question enquires into which of these four theoretical perspectives has the best fit when seeking to explain protest cyclicity over time. It is hypothesised that the ‘waxing and waning’ of protest activity can best be attributed to the difficulties surrounding the identification and construction of resonant CAFs. However, the study’s findings lead to a rejection of the first hypothesis by deemphasising the role of CAFs in predicting protest cyclicity, and instead support the theoretical predictions of the POS perspective, suggesting the prevalence of structural factors such as the regime’s capacity for repression and shifts in elite alignments. The second research question revolves around variations in protest mobilisation across four issue areas and explores the reasons why socioeconomic grievances mobilised more people to protest than environmental, political and interethnic ones. According to the second hypothesis, people more readily protest around socioeconomic rather than political and other types of grievances due to the lower costs of participation in socioeconomic protests. While the regime’s propensity for repressing political protests could explain the prevalence of socioeconomic protests in the 2000s, the POS perspective’s key explanatory variable failed to account for the prevalence of socioeconomic protests in the early 1990s, resulting in the rejection of the second hypothesis. The second part of the thesis attempts to answer the third research question: How does protest mobilisation account for the stalled transition to democracy in Kazakhstan in the 1990s? Based on the theoretical assumption that instances of extensive protest mobilisation foster democratic transitions, the study’s third research hypothesis posits that transition to democracy in Kazakhstan stalled in the mid-1990s due to the failure of social movement organisations to effectively mobilise the masses for various acts of protest. This assumption receives strong empirical support, suggesting that protest mobilisation is an important facilitative factor in the democratisation process. The thesis is the first to attempt to employ classical social movement theories in the context of post-communist Central Asian societies. Additionally, the study aims to contribute to the large pool of democratisation literature which, until recently (following the colour revolutions), seemed to underplay the role of popular protest mobilisation in advancing transitions to democracy. Finally, the research is based on the author’s primary elite-interview data and content analysis of five weekly independent newspapers.