Kazakhstan’s new unicameral legislature is getting down to business, having recently considered a republican budget for 2027-2029 and other measures. Proponents say a single parliamentary chamber will be nimbler than a bicameral legislature, making the challenges of legislating in the Digital Age easier. But some experts caution about downside risks, saying that speeding up the legislative process can lead to poorly crafted laws.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has framed the new legislature, established under the new constitution that took effect July 1, as needed to accelerate his reform program. “The Kurultai will set a high pace for the further modernization of the country,” he said. The argument is straightforward: a single chamber should make it easier for the government to move legislation through the system.
At the closing session of the Senate in late June, the chamber’s speaker, Maulen Ashimbayev, noted that during its 30-year existence, the bicameral legislature adopted more than 3,500 laws – an average of roughly 117 per year. Those numbers complicate the argument that bicameralism acted as a brake on the adoption of legislation.
The fundamental question now is: does faster decision-making necessarily mean better legislation?
It is not the first time Kazakhstan has grappled with this question. After independence, the country retained a unicameral Supreme Soviet, a holdover from the communist era. It was not long before legislative leaders started clashing with the executive branch led by then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Supreme Soviet vexed Nazarbayev by adopting legislation that was not aligned with budgetary realities. Deputies also blocked the president’s initial efforts to reform the legislative branch.
Nazarbayev eventually overcame the Supreme Soviet’s obstructionism and by 1995 engineered the adoption of a new constitution establishing a bicameral legislature. The new arrangement was designed to serve different constituencies: the Senate was intended to give the regions a direct voice in national politics, while the lower chamber, the Mazhilis, combined party-based and territorial representation. At the same time, the new system strengthened executive authority.
Now, after three decades, Kazakhstan has gone back to a single-chamber system. But the new Kurultai is not simply a return to the Supreme Soviet of the early 1990s. It will operate under an entirely different constitutional and electoral system. The new constitution gives the Kurultai substantial formal powers: it can adopt laws, override presidential vetoes, confirm presidential appointments, initiate national referendums and express no confidence in the government.
Both the unicameral and bicameral models have their pluses and minuses, said Jenik Radon, an international lawyer who advised on the drafting of Nepal’s 2006 constitution, and who has helped draft a raft of legislation in Estonia. The choice between unicameralism and bicameralism, he said, “depends on the country, its history, its culture and a host of other factors.”
The new Kazakh legislature, the Kurultai, has 145 members elected via a proportional system. This method of electing MPs is considerably more straightforward than the previous method: the Mazhilis and Senate had different electoral rules and different electoral cycles. In Kazakhstan’s case, the new system perhaps make it “easier for citizens to understand the democratic rule-making process,” Radon said.
The chief risk of a unicameral legislature is haste leading to ineffective laws. The “give and take” of a bicameral process tends to “result in a better outcome, better legislation, as more opinions and viewpoints will be aired and heard,” Radon said. A single legislature naturally lacks a check. And the danger of a runaway legislative process is heightened if a single political party has a dominating majority in a unicameral chamber.
This happens to be the case with the Kurultai, in which the pro-presidential Adilet Party holds 110 of 145 seats. While that does not necessarily mean that the Kurultai will lack meaningful debate, it does suggest a lack of means to force additional scrutiny of draft legislation seen as controversial. And even though the Kurultai contains multiple parties, there is no longer a representative electoral vehicle that can guarantee regional interests enjoy representation at the national level.
Historically, bicameralism has been seen as offering a greater level of protection against the concentration of too much authority in the hands of a single party or individual. But within the post-communist context, that has not always been the case.
“If you look at the recent history of Poland which is bicameral and Hungary which is unicameral, the outcome of monopolization of power was the same,” Radon said.
Ultimately, for Kazakhstan’s Kurultai, the real test of its effectiveness will not simply be how quickly it passes laws, but whether it can make the process sufficiently transparent and open to input from different interest groups, as well as be responsive to the people those laws affect.