Explaining the failure of legislative agency in patronal divided executives: deputy meaning making and its impact on legislative quality in Kyrgyzstan 2010–2020

In divided-executive patronal systems, legislatures have been sites of resistance to the centralization of power in a single patronal pyramid. Kyrgyzstan is an anomaly among divided-executive patronal systems when between 2010 to 2020, the Kyrgyz parliament was neither a site of opposition nor did it demonstrate legislative agency vis-à-vis the executive. Instead, following another uprising in 2020, a unified single patronal pyramid was re-established. Adopting an approach rooted in the semiotics of meaning making and drawing on a dataset of interviews with parliamentary deputies and a range of documentary sources, this article complements existing institutional approaches to explaining weak legislative agency by revealing a series of dialogical relationships between deputy meaning making and broader institutional and cultural constraints which shaped the Kyrgyz’s parliament’s overall quality and strength. These relationships pertain to legislative initiative, the protection of private interests and representation, with the interplay between the ascribed meaning and its constitution within broader institutional and cultural context contributing to the diminishment of legislative agency vis-à-vis the presidency. Kyrgyzstan illustrates the value of meaning making as an approach to understanding legislative-executive relations in non-democratic contexts, and its impact in conjunction with cultural and institutional constraints in shaping legislative agency.