Building Parliamentarism Under a Weak Parliament: Intra-Institutional Challenges of Kyrgyzstan’s Aspiration for a System Shift

Abstract

In recent years the Kyrgyz parliament became an arena of heated political disputes and internal confrontations. One might think that these are natural conditions of a parliament in a democratic state. However, the confrontations caused a lot of challenges to the overall advancement of the parliamentary system in Kyrgyzstan. Thus, this paper endeavors to find the reasons of the challenges and seeks answers to the question: how do the informal relations, internal structure, dynamics in the parliament affect the shift to parliamentary system in Kyrgyzstan? The Thesis analyses the internal challenges of parliament’s development. Three case studies are implemented to confirm the hypothesis. The paper also analyzes the literature on rational choice institutionalism and patronal politics for theoretical background. Findings answer the hypothesis that internal factional and patronal networks delay the advancement of parliamentarism in Kyrgyzstan.