The Soft Authoritarian Tool Kit: Agenda-Setting Power in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

In March 2005 Kyrgyzstan's soft authoritarian regime crumbled as its president, Askar Akaev, sought political cover in Russia. The so-called Tulip Revolution capped a series of events in which street demonstrators protested the conduct of parliamentary elections and eventually demanded Akaev 's ouster.1 Akaev resigned in April. In December of the same year in neighboring Kazakhstan, by stark contrast, soft authoritarian president Nursultan Nazarbaev was reelected with over 91 percent of the vote. While the poll did not meet international standards, most observers estimate that Nazarbaev enjoyed overwhelming support and would have easily won a free and fair contest. All the while, Nazarbaev faced negligible risk of a frontal challenge to his authority. Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 and Kazakhstan in December 2005 provide contrasting snapshots of soft authoritarian regimes. Why does one soft authoritarian regime succeed where another fails? What allows a nondemocratic system that does not rely centrally on coercion to perpetuate itself? If elections and civil liberties are the principal institutionalized mechanisms of democratic governance, and if naked coercion is the centerpiece of hard authoritarianism, what allows a soft-authoritarian system to survive? How can nondemocracies be conceptualized? Many recent studies focus on hybrid regimes regimes that combine elements of electoral democracy and authoritarianism. In such hybrid regimes, flawed elections may determine intraelite power struggles, and a facade of human rights protections may play a legitimating role, though both fail to meet international standards.2 Like these theorists of hybrid regimes I am dissatisfied with binary categories of democracy and authoritarianism.3 However, this article focuses attention on regimes that by convention fall within the authoritarian category and asks what makes them function.4 The cement of soft authoritarian rule is an elite's ability to frame political debate, thereby defining the political agenda and channeling political outcomes. Soft authoritarianism relies more centrally on the means of persuasion than on the means of coercion, although coercion remains a part of the ruling elite's arsenal.5 Based on a contrast