None of the five Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) have fulfilled the democratic aspirations that were held by their citizens and U.S. policymakers upon their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Succession, the handover of power from one leader to another, is a moment of accountability for a political system. ‘The absence of a transparent, consistently implemented, non-arbitrary transfer of power mechanism means that power is transferred inevitably by coups, whether through covert opaque manipulations…or physical elimination (Ra’anan 2006).” This paper looks at Central Asia’s unpredictable leadership changes and the consequent crises that resulted from the absence of a mechanism for legitimate succession. Whether it is Kyrgyzstan’s “Tulip Revolution,” where within weeks of protests, the country’s authoritarian leader, Askar Akayev, fled the country, and Kyrgyzstan soon elected a new government or Turkmenistan, where the death of a long-ruling, bizarre autocrat, “Turkmenbashi,” in 2006 offered the chance for reform, only to have the country’s elites replace him with another palace insider--, hopes for more participatory societies met disillusionment. Kazakhstan, once a democratic hope, has descended into political ruthlessness, with opposition leaders brutally murdered and power concentrated in a tiny circle around President Nursultan Nazarbayev. In particular, this study will analyze ensuing power struggles, which have taken place over the last eighteen years, seeking to identify systemic patterns and generalizations relating to civic society, political opposition, and political stability, A key problem in all political orders is that of succession. The question of how to pass executive power to a new generation has been one of the central cruxes of political science, dating from the time of classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.. Democracies provide a clear process of succession for who succeeds to power; and an answer to the succession problem has been one of constitutional government’s triumphs. Such succession becomes a dilemma in non-constitutional monarchies and autocracies. The current generation of Central Asian leaders has been socialized in the repressive collective memories of the Soviet state. However, the majority of the population in these countries has no memory of Soviet rule and is being socialized in very different political conditions. Data for my research is drawn from interviews with government officials, desk research using published material and unpublished reports, minutes of meetings and hearings, newspapers, and the extensive material provided through various list-serves.

Recent research findings by Binnaz Toprak have unearthed that social conformity have reached a level of intolerance in several Anatolian cities, where right-wing nationalists and religious vigilantes make life miserable for those who seem to lead liberal or non-traditional life styles. Similar research conducted by Carkoglu, and Yilmaz have also documented that the voters have gone through a re-alignment and shifted their attitudes toward increasing levels of conservatism and Sunni Islamism in the recent decades. Such a shift should have deep running influences on the attitudes and demands of the public from the governments and a corresponding change of policies should be expected to materialize. We have little if any research that focus on the nexus between the state of mind (ideology) of the Turkish voters and their policy expectations from the government, on the one hand, and the government policies, on the other. This paper focuses on the relationship between the positions of the voters on the left – right spectrum and related ideological stances on conservatism, secularism versus Sunni religiosity, étatism versus liberal market economy, and the like and their policy expectations on economic, health, education and other social welfare issues from the government at the time of the 2007 general elections. The data for the paper were collected through a pre-election national representative survey during June and July 2007. The findings of the paper show how the rightward shift of public opinion in Turkey influenced policy expectations of the voters and also engendered the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to follow certain economic, and social welfare policies, on the one hand, and how the attitudes of the voters have failed to make an impact on other policy areas. This paper also demonstrates the limits of the political influence of the voters on elected governments in the Turkish case.

The classic conception of the public sphere – as seen in the writings of thinkers like Hannah Arendt – draws on the Greek agora – the place where we can, as citizens, come together face-to-face in an arena outside both the family and the economy, to discuss matters of public interest. Jürgen Habermas takes the Arendtian conception and, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, expands it. Habermas argues that in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a growth in the scope of the public sphere wherein face to face contact was partially replaced with the exchange of information through long distance commerce and the growth of the capitalist state. In contemporary political theory, the standard model of the public sphere sees it as the most important way in which civil society relates to the economy and the government (Cohen and Arato 1992, 411). A well-grounded civil society, stabilized through the appropriate structural mechanism, is essential to all forms of political theory – from secular natural law theories to discourse ethics. Much of the recent literature on the public spheres and civil society in the Middle East and Central Asia has tended to focus either on the emergence of local public spheres that are structurally different from the model employed by Habermas, and Cohen and Arato – for example, Qat Chews in Yemen (Wedewn 2007), or as alternative non-Westphalian institutions – for example, a transnational Islamic Public Sphere, (Salvatore 2007). While both show how public identities can be formed outside Western secular models of deliberation, I argue that these modes of bargaining cannot properly be called public spheres. I show that in these works, the authors gloss over an important component of public deliberation – lack of deference to rank and authority. Much recent aid work in Afghanistan has focused on the need to create both a strong civil society and a revitalized public sphere. Drawing on my research in Afghanistan, I argue that public debate is a necessary, but not sufficient condition, for an emergent public sphere and hence a strong civil society. The other models of Middle Eastern and Central Asian public spheres, while attempting to broaden the Habermasian concept, overlook the crucial leveling of rank necessary for the formation of democratic persons.

According to Islamic tradition, the Bay'a (translated as investiture or an oath of allegiance) is an act by which a certain number of persons, acting individually or collectively, recognize the authority of another person as the head of the Muslim state. This study analyzes the different modern political uses of the Bay'a in the Arab world. Based on research of seven Arab case studies - the Kingdom of Hijaz, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, the study presents three arguments: First, the Bay'a eveolved into an elastic term politically used in a variety of ways by different Arab regimes. Second, the evoking of the Bay'a ritual has often been a response to a domestic necessity ot crisis. Finally, the use of this traditional ritual, along modern Western symbolic artifacts, is an indication of the evolving hybrid nature of the Arab political culture, based on a market of a mixed reservoir of foreign and local rituals and symbols. The interplay between foreign and local artifacts depends on the state's specific historical circumstances, which include also the impact of the colonial period. Ultimately, the modern uses of the Bay'a demonstrate that modernity, in its Western version, has not been adopted wholesale. The Bay'a ritual has been kept almost intact only in Saudi Arabia - territory which did not go through the colonial experience. In contrast, Iraq, Syria and Jordan, which were under colonial rule, used an adapted version of this instrument on a temporary and utilitarian basis.