Abstract
Although Kazakhstan's civil service reforms have the explicit objective of depoliticizing administrative personnel, they have had limited success in achieving that end. Contrary to the formal objective, they make the worlds of political and administrative executives all but indistinguishable. A considerable gap between formal rules and their informal understanding creates loose boundaries of permitted behavior and allows discretionary enforcement and influence. The failure to reach the stated policy objective underscores the paradoxical coexistence of two political environments: one marked by its de jure centralized political structure and another by its de facto decentralization at various levels of civil service.