Only recently, scholars began to examining culture and discovering relationships between culture and economic behavior. Landes, who first called attention to the importance of endogenous variables in development, insisted that "…if we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference" (1998, p. 516). Several other noneconomists tried to draw attention to a country’s endogenous variables to explain unforeseen development outcomes and criticize the reductionist economic models (Keating et al., 2005; Guiso et al., 2006; Tabellini, 2010 ). Guiso et al. (2006) observed that “… Not only did economics lose any interest in its relation with culture, but, as it became more self-confident in its own capabilities, it moved to explain culture as a mere outcome of economic forces” (p.8). These non-economist scholars used mathematical tools to show how culture affected peoples’ trust in economic institutions, and how cultural characteristics like religion and ethnicity influenced peoples’ economic behavior (Guiso, et al., 2006). In line with non-economist approaches, my single-country case study of corruption in the Republic of Kazakhstan analyzes the effects of economic “shock therapy” models and theorizes the role of culture in the growth and rapid development of systemic corruption.
The causes and effects of corruption in Kazakhstan have been studied from different theoretical perspectives. Typically, researchers tended to focus narrowly on a particular aspect of corruption like rent-seeking behavior (Hug, 2010), a lack of democratic culture (Nichols, 2001; Hug, 2010), a weak judicial system (Simonov, 2011; Kaliyeva, 2013), the limited power of civil society
(Dzhandosova et al., 2007), the “resource curse” (Bayulgen, 2009), or contextual corruption (De Graaf, 2007). However, researchers have not sufficiently covered the social and ethnographic causes of corruption, such as the psychological effects of rapid ideological and economic transition, nor did they explain the high level of tolerance of corruption by the local population under the conditions of a developing market economy. In this article I intend to fill this gap by discussing the “soft” causes of systemic corruption in Kazakhstan as opposed to the “hard” causes, such as institutional and legal failures.