Values and Transformation in Central Asia

The aim of this article is to interpret post-Soviet political change in Central Asia from the perspective of stability versus change of political values, specifically how support for democracy and personal freedoms, acceptance of authoritarianism and autocracy, and the emphasis on self-expression values or survival values have changed or remained stable over time, and how this has fueled the dynamics of post-Soviet political transition. We analyze the paths, vectors, and dynamics of political transformation in Central Asian states and explore how democratic transition or consolidation of autocratic rule is associated with the political culture of the populations of these states and their political values, including their attitudes toward different and alternative political regimes, the importance of free and fair elections, the significance of basic human freedoms and rights, institutional trust, and different levels of political identities. We begin from reviewing the paths of transformation in all five post-Soviet Central Asian republics using the Polity IV and V-Dem indexes of political regime. In the second part of the article, we use the data from the World Values Survey to analyze the structure and the status of the political culture of the population of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. There we are aiming to examine how the values, norms, beliefs, and behavior of their citizens are associated with the different outcomes of the political transformation process these countries have now reached.

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