One Uzbek scholar suggested to me several years ago that a social scientist could write a dissertation based on the views of taxicab drivers. One need only strike up a conversation with a cab driver in Central Asia to hear a tirade about whose clan controls the country. Eight to ten years ago, Kyrgyz cab drivers openly complained about clan politics, but in recent years Uzbek and Tajik cab drivers are often equally effusive. My Uzbek colleague was only partly joking. And even if not completely accurate, cab drivers' perceptions of their political system's problems often reflect public awareness of these issues.

I did not do a survey of cab drivers, but this chapter examines the rise of clan politics within the new, post-transitional authoritarian regimes of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Here, the politics of clans and their corrosive effects are not as plainly visible as in Kyrgyzstan, whose liberalizing regime was particularly susceptible to the effects of clan politics and made this phenomenon easier to observe. Nonetheless, clans are critical political and economic players that affect key institutions and policies of these authoritarian regimes as well. The previous chapter has already discussed local-level identity networks in these cases; this chapter turns to their elite and meso-level institutions. Uzbek and Tajik authoritarianism becomes penetrated and weakened by clan rivalries.

Explaining the nonconsolidation of an autocratic regime is not a task that comparative politics has typically attempted.