Legalized Rent-Seeking: Local Government, Law, and Land Rights in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan has ranked consistently poorly on measures of property rights protection, and rule of law more generally (Heritage Foundation, 2015). Echoing these evaluations, existing literature emphasizes the degree to which informal institutions shape property relations in personalist, authoritarian regimes, including Kazakhstan; the expectation is that formal institutions like law and courts fail to restrain or otherwise influence state agents’ rent-seeking behavior. In effect, they serve primarily as ornamentation. But these explanations fail to explain why we see Kazakhstan investing heavily in civil law and courts. Moreover, both citizens and the state regularly turn to these institutions to settle property disputes. Among the most common involve land, namely, expropriation for state needs. This article finds that in citizen-state disputes over land rights, law provides lower and upper bounds for officials’ rent-seeking behavior. Within these bounds, law combines with informal, personal ties to determine legal outcomes. While usually these decisions favor officials, law and courts sometimes provide citizens with opportunities for limited redress — not an equal opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless. ∗This research was made possible by support from the following: the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; IREX Title VIII Individual Advanced Research Opportunities program; and the Ohio State University’s Office of International Affairs.