ABSTRACT
In transitional regimes institutional design is a series of choices political actors undertake in devising the rules of the game for, and the constraints of, political competition (North, 1990). Institutional choice, therefore, has an important effect on regime transition, the functioning of institutions and organizations and the quality of democracy (Stepan and Skach, 1993; Linz and Valenzuela, 1994). Many authors have sought to explore not just the effects of institutional choice but also institutional origins with cultural and structural legacies, elite bargaining and the uncertainty of transition all posited as explanatory variables (Bawn, 1993; Frye, 1997; Jones Luong, 2000). This chapter is concerned with both institutional change and the institutional effects of institutional choice and design. As noted in the previous chapter, the uncertain context of transition played a central role in the decision-making process of the president of Kazakhstan and his reliance on informal political relations and behaviour and thus on his preference of institutional choice. Implicit in such a view is the assumption that ‘political actors are motivated by concerns for their individual political power and choose institutions under varying degrees of uncertainty’ (Frye, 1997: 524). What, therefore, has been the impact of political institutional choice and design on political parties in Kazakhstan? And how has the president's reliance on informal political relations and behaviour affected the operation of those institutional constraints?
