The Institutional Mode of Kazakhstan’s Civil Field: Registry Structure, Public Visibility, and Tax-Payment Trace

Problem. Standard approaches to civil society in post-Soviet hybrid regimes often reduce the civil field to registered non-commercial organizations, missing individual public actors and event-based mobilizations. The registry is then read as if it were a full picture of the civil field — a category error. Method. The article anatomizes the institutional mode of civic activity (one of three modes) in the Kazakhstan case. The evidence architecture is multi-layered: registry structure, formal connectedness, public visibility, and tax-payment trace, applied to the C1–C7 functional layers of the civil field. The analysis is supplemented by a 2021–2026 trajectory, publication-safe composite genre descriptions, and a transnational check across external source families. Distributed and emergent modes are treated in parallel pilots, outside the scope of this article. Results. Within the institutional mode, the analysis identifies a stable bifurcation between two sampling layers: a thin formal-associative core (D3 NPO-core, 17,786 organizations; covers the institutional projection of C1) and a thicker institutional boundary layer (D2 boundary, 5,548 organizations; partial coverage of C2). D2 boundary shows higher public visibility than D3 (41.67% vs. 25.56%; +16.11 pp; 95% screening interval [5.23; 26.99]) and a stronger tax-payment trace (37.56% vs. 17.38%). Thematically, D3 concentrates in the civic-associative cluster (82%); D2 boundary is compositionally specific: ~41% professional chambers and legal self-regulating organizations, ~23% private educational institutions, ~17% religious organizations. 40–46% of the infrastructure concentrates in three cities. The human-rights cluster shows anomalously low institutional visibility (25% vs. 62–100% elsewhere). The 2021–2026 trajectory shows uninterrupted growth of the payer-organization base (+14.98%), no visible administrative collapse in the January 2022 event window, and faster growth of the non-state civic segment than the state/public-sector segment (+18.01% vs. +8.83%). Claim ceilings. Claims are limited to the intersection of the institutional mode with C1/C2 (production core and organizational layer). The article does not describe the civil field exhaustively; makes no claims about influence, effectiveness, or foreign control; does not measure distributed or emergent activity; represents C3 (donor/financial), C5 (symbolic-media), and C6 (boundary/consultative) only through composite genre descriptions; covers C4 (legal/protective) only through a diagnostic sample; and represents C7 (transnational/diasporic) only through external-source visibility of C1/C2 organizations, not through the structure of transnational actors themselves. The anomalously low institutional visibility of the human-rights cluster may reflect displacement into other modes and requires separate verification. A full anatomy of the uncovered and diagnostically represented layers requires additional pilots.