Social Imprints of Political and Cultural Values. the Case of Kazakhstan

The social structure of society should be explored in order to identify the factors that influence the establishment of a given political regime and the reasons for the formation of various political systems and institutions in various societies. Since there are currently no well-defined aproaches for examining the democratic nations that arose following the fall of the USSR, we investigate Kazakhstan as a nation with a developing democratic government. As we analyze the connection between political values and socioeconomic status, we aim to address the following research questions: which political values are more ingrained in Kazakhstani society? How much within society do the political beliefs of various social groupings align and diverge? The study's empirical foundation consisted of data from a national representative social survey that was conducted by KISI in June 2024.

Social status has been chosen as a social class indicator for the research. The eleven-stage socio-professional stratification scheme (EGP) created by J. Goldthorpe was selected to place a respondent into a specific social class. The three categories of social relationships—employers, employees, and entrepreneurs—are the foundation of the analysis.

A left-right scale with two opposing poles is typically taken into consideration when examining political values. According to our study, respondents' attitudes on social policy, economic involvement by the state, and social inequality reflect the differences between these two categories of values. Finally our political values scale is exclusively focused on the economic side because it was constructed only on the basis of inquiries concerning the function of the state in the economy. Therefore, people who support little government involvement in economic affairs are described by the right pole, while those who oppose cutting government spending and think the state should give its citizens good pensions and unemployment benefits are represented by the left pole.