This chapter assesses the potentials for and constraints upon progressive political change in Uzbekistan. Its first part establishes a point of reference by discussing the recent reinvigoration of elite theory as a result of studies of post-communist transformations in East Central Europe in the 1990s. It begins by distinguishing different approaches to the study of those transformations and how the “transformation” approach differs from the “transition” approach. It discusses the implications of the empirical findings in East Central Europe for the classics of elite theory from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then systematizes the differences between the “power elite” and “polyarchy” ideal-types, whereupon it establishes a middle ground between them that offers an empirical criterion representing a starting-point for assessing the degree of “de-authoritarization” (as distinct from “democratization”) of an authoritarian regime such as Uzbekistan's. In order to flesh out certain auxiliary concepts necessary for applying the criterion, it gives an example of the application of that criterion to the Khrushchev era in the Soviet Union (1953-64). The Khrushchev example allows an explanation of how the criterion is implemented with the aid of three auxiliary concepts: (bottom-up) “mobilization of the public sphere”, (top-down) “conformance of civil society” and (middle-level) “consolidation of organized officialdom”. With this framework, the rest of the chapter looks at political change in Uzbekistan since 1983, the necessary starting-point for understanding the present situation. Two cycles of political change are evident. The first stretches from 1983 until 1989 and comprises three phases: consolidation, conformance and mobilization. The second cycle stretches from 1989 to the present and comprises phases of mobilization, conformance and consolidation in that order. What these phases represent is specified in terms of what they imply for the structural transformation

Piaget, J. Le structuralisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968).