Henry Hale’s thoughtful review raises several key questions central to the study of regime transitions. The first relates to national identity and authoritarianism. My book argues that national identities divided between relatively equal groups can undermine both democratic and authoritarian consolidation. Because national identity often evokes strong passions, opposition is able to use divisions to mobilize large-scale popular support even in the face of repression—thereby fostering powerful opposition challenges and undermining efforts to monopolize political control. I focus on divisions in titular national identity because such groups would seem more likely to demand national power rather than secession. There is little reason to believe that secessionist movements by groups outside the titular identity would promote pluralism; they may indeed justify authoritarian crackdowns.

Where does Kazakhstan fit in all of this? I would not consider Kazakh clans or khuz to be evidence of divisions as they are mostly elite phenomena that lack the broad popular salience necessary to facilitate large-scale opposition mobilization (Edward Schatz, Modern Clan Politics, 2004). Simultaneously, Russians within Kazakhstan (as Hale notes) are generally considered outside the titular national identity. We would not expect the division between Kazakhs and Russian to foster pluralism. And indeed, political contestation in Kazakhstan has been severely limited.

Next, Hale asks why I put greater emphasis on political organizations and less on formal institutions. While often conflated, organizations and institutions are conceptually and empirically distinct. Formal institutions (constitutions, laws) refer written rules. Organizations are political structures (parties, states, clubs, clans) through which allies cooperate to conduct affairs. As Samuel Huntington notes, organizations involve “regularized, stable, and sustained coming together” (Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968, p. 10). I focus on organization because it is so central to autocratic rule—which almost always requires a loyal and cohesive core and state apparatus willing to do what is necessary to keep the regime in power. By contrast, effective formal institutions are core to democracy but often absent in autocracies. At the same time, I do not believe that constitutions are necessarily epiphenomenal: Hale’s insightful scholarship has convinced me that my previous work overstated the weakness of institutions in transitional countries. Formal rules do sometimes have an independent impact on political outcomes—even in countries with weak rules of law. However, I remain doubtful that such rules are determinative in shaping regime outcomes in most cases.

What are the sources of organizational strength? While not the main focus of the analysis, my book highlights several sources of organizational weakness that facilitated the rise of pluralism by default in the former Soviet Union. First, of course, Gorbachev consciously weakened the Communist Party—removing the Party’s control over the economy and preventing the Central apparatus from responding in any coordinated fashion to rapid political shifts during Perestroika. Second, fiscal crisis and state breakdown in the early 1990s fundamentally weakened bureaucratic mechanisms of control. Finally, emerging nationalist movements in many republics encouraged old apparatchiks—including Leonid Kravchuk in Ukraine and Mircea Snegur in Moldova—to finish the Party off and further weaken the authoritarian state. As a result, these leaders, like autocrats in many other weak states, lacked the capacity to steal elections or clamp down on opposition—resulting in pluralism by default.