ABSTRACT
Political parties are considered indispensible to democracy (Lipset, 2000). Their ability to shape and aggregate interests, represent citizens and act as a channel between state and society has made party system formation one of the most fundamental areas of research in developing democracies. This has been particularly the case in the transitions from communism in the former Soviet Union (McAl-lister and White, 1995; McFaul, 2004, 2001; Meleshevich, 2007; Moser, 1998; Spirova, 2008; Whitfield, 2002). This book explores the formation of a party system and the nature of political parties in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet state which has received limited interest in academic political science literature. However, it is also a book which examines the underlying political phenomena influencing Kazakhstan's transition from communist rule. It explores the distinctive interactive and dynamic relationship between formal and informal politics which is woven into the fabric of political behaviour, institutions and outcomes in Kazakhstan and wider post-Soviet Central Asia. It examines, in particular, how informal patrimonial politics is shaping party development and at the same time how parties, as formal institutions, are affecting informal political behaviour and relations. As this book argues, Kazakhstan is best understood as a neopatrimonial system where informal patrimonial politics such as personalism of office, patron–client networks and factional elite conflict are interwoven with formal legal-rational institutions. This book addresses this relationship between informal and formal politics and how political parties contribute towards authoritarian consolidation in Kazakhstan. In doing so it develops some conceptual innovations around the dynamic relationship between informal and formal politics and its contribution to authoritarian regime durability in the wider former Soviet Union.
