Access by Accident: Legitimacy Claims and Democracy Promotion in Authoritarian Central Asia

The adjective “authoritarian” to describe political regimes obscures much variety. What makes some regimes “soft” authoritarian and others “hard?” This article suggests that the involvement of democracy advocates helps to drive variation in Central Asia's authoritarian regimes. The role that these advocates play in the region, in turn, may be traced in part to unintended consequences. Specifically, elites made early choices about how to frame the legitimacy of the state, which, in turn, set the parameters for their maneuver in subsequent political transformations.