The present research paper attempts to apply the issue attention cycle model of Anthony Downs to corruption issues in the contexts of Canada as a democracy, and Kazakhstan as a soft authoritarian regime. The major contributions to the existing body of knowledge include: 1. replicating the Down’s model to analyze the corruption issue across the two countries; and 2. attempting to observe cycle variations depending on the nature of political regimes, and thus holding the regime as an independent variable as applied to the Down’s model.
