The Republic of Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world, and its democratic development was represented by chairmanship of the OSCE in 2010. During 24-year history of Kazakhstan's independence, there has been observed a fair progress in the development of paramount state institutions as well as in the voting system, which has been continuously developing and improving in accordance with legislation and international experience. And such a development is in the first place of importance for the whole population of Kazakhstan nowadays, which has been also recalled in the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, adopted on the 30th of August in 1995. However, as it is already known from the experience of Western countries, such methods like for outward appearances of improving the system of voting and other civil institutions are not able to produce satisfactory results on the way to the building of democratic state. For that purpose, in this essay I will examine the fundamental and legal issues of why in Kazakhstan there is a low concernment of people in exercising their right to vote and participate in the all-nation referendum, guaranteed by the Constitution, and propose some possible solutions for this unavoidable problem.
First of all, it is important to underline that in the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, in particular in the Second Section, named as "The Individual and Citizen" there is an Article 33, which contains four rules, concerning the citizen's participation right to governance. The first one indicates that citizens of the Republic of Kazakhstan have the right to participate in the government of the state's affairs directly and through their representatives, to address personally as well as to direct individual and collective appeals to public and local self-administrative bodies. As follows, the next is about that citizens of the Republic have the right to elect and be elected into public and local self-administrations as well as to participate in an all-nation referendum.
