Abstract

Why do authoritarian leaders reform judiciaries they have spent decades constraining? I argue that strategies of judicial containment can produce overly deferential cultures that frustrate the regime's own objectives — legitimation, economic predictability, bureaucratic oversight — creating pressure to alter the composition of the bench. I investigate Kazakhstan's 2021 Administrative Procedures and Process Code, which established specialized administrative courts as part of President Tokayev's "Listening State" agenda. The reform staffed these courts partly with judges recruited from outside the career judiciary — bokoviki ("laterals") — to break what reformers described as an entrenched culture of judicial passivity. Analyzing over 7,000 Supreme Court administrative decisions (2021–2025) and interviews with judges, government lawyers, and litigants, I find that lateral presence on panels is associated with higher reversal rates of lower-court decisions favoring agencies, particularly against cabinet-level ministries and agencies rather than local bodies. This pattern complicates expectations that administrative courts in authoritarian settings primarily serve the center's interest in disciplining peripheral agents. Interview evidence reveals how this orientation was transmitted downward through informal mentorship, practice bulletins, and strategic sanctions, but also its limits: courts that aggressively scrutinized agencies exhibited marked caution in politically sensitive cases. By 2026, the political rhetoric had shifted toward "Law and Order," several lateral judges had departed, and agencies continued pursuing legislative rollbacks, raising questions about the durability of reforms