Kazakhstani public opinion of the United States and Russia: testing variables of (un)favourability

Marlene Laruelle and Dylan Royce

Central Asian Survey, 2019, vol. 38, issue 2, 197-216

Abstract: Though Central Asia is often studied through the prism of its relationships with external powers, research on local public perceptions of these different actors has largely been overlooked. The literature on Kazakhstanis’ perceptions of their neighbours, for instance, is scarce, and mostly focused on analysis of official discourse on Kazakhstan’s multi-vector policy, with little exploration of how this is received, appropriated or refuted by the population. On the basis of Gallup data spanning the last decade, and several other surveys, we test most of the main hypotheses usually advanced to explain attitudes to the US and Russia – age, ethnicity and access to information – and draw five main conclusions: (1) Kazakhstanis are not defined by an exclusive pro-US/pro-Russian dichotomy; (2) they nevertheless largely choose Russia over the US if forced to pick; (3) age does not have a significant effect on foreign policy attitudes; (4) ethnicity does affect some of the attitudes under consideration, but its effects are not large enough to produce markedly different opinions among ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Russians in aggregate; and (5) consumption of media from Russia and access to non-governmental and Western sources of information do not seem to have significant effects on the attitudes under consideration.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02634937.2019.1596879 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ccasxx:v:38:y:2019:i:2:p:197-216

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ccas20

DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2019.1596879

Access Statistics for this article

Central Asian Survey is currently edited by Raphael Jacquet

More articles in Central Asian Survey from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().