‘Listening State?’: exploring citizens’ perceptions of Open Government in Tokayev’s Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT

The Open Government reform has been actively adopted across various non-democratic regimes, including post-Soviet Central Asia. The reform is supposed to bolster responsiveness and transparency through the active use of information communication technologies, and numerous authoritarian countries have recently adopted and deepened the Open Government reform. In this work, we study whether Open Government reform contributes to responsiveness in autocracies using the case of Kazakhstan under Tokayev’s rule (2019–present). We investigate the concept of the ‘Listening State’ recently adopted in Kazakhstan through the analysis of novel primary data. The perceptions of ordinary citizens reveal that the Open Government reform in the country has not led to the realization of its key goal of increased responsiveness. Therefore, we argue that the Open Government reform has serious limitations in achieving its ultimate goal of a better listening state to people’s needs in autocracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Open Government
• government responsiveness
• citizen participation
• authoritarianism
• authoritarian upgrading
• Kazakhstan

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2022 Central Eurasian Studies Society conference at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. We express our gratitude to the data collection team at the Eurasian Integration Institute (EII). We thank Raushan Abylkassymova, Dr Colin Knox, Dr Renat Shaykhutdinov and Marika Olijar for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments on this article, and the editor (Dr Rico Isaacs) for excellent work. Factual mistakes or controversial interpretations are ours alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Eurasian Integration Institute (EII) is a subsidiary organization of the Committee for Science at the Ministry of Higher Education and Science of Kazakhstan. It was formed on 31 October 2012 by the Kazakhstani Government’s Decree No. 1374. The EII is an officially accredited scientific and research centre in Kazakhstan. Its address is 12/1 Kunayev Street, Business Center ‘Vodno-Zelenyi Bulvar’, 14th floor, Astana City. Contact information: [email protected]; [phone].

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan [grant number AP13268866]; and the Eurasian Integration Institute (EII).