Hybrid Regimes and the Grey Zone: New Answers to Fundamental Problems in the Study of Political Regimes Cover Image

Hibrid rezsimek és a szürke zóna: új válaszok a politikai rezsimek rendszertanának örök kérdéseire
Hybrid Regimes and the Grey Zone: New Answers to Fundamental Problems in the Study of Political Regimes

Author(s): Attila Gyulai, Juliane Stein-Zalai
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Civil Society, Politics and society
Published by: Debreceni Egyetem Politikatudományi és Szociológiai Intézet
Keywords: democratic theory; hybrid regime; democracy with adjectives; authoritarianism with adjectives; liberal democracy

Summary/Abstract: Contrary to widely held expectations, the third wave of democratization has brought about not only democracy but also the emergence of many regimes of whichtraditional democratic theory cannot make sense. The overwhelmingly dichotomous, teleological, and minimalist approaches fail to adequately describe political regimes in the grey zone between outright autocracy and full-fledged democracy. In our essay, we discuss the theoretical approaches that aim to grasp what has been increasingly called hybrid regimes, namely political regimes that combine autoritharian and democratic elements. We point to the theoretical and empirical limitations of these efforts and argue that the concept of hybrid regimes is still inextricably linked with the concept of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, even if the existing approaches to hybrid regimes suffer from a series of shortcomings, by providing fine-grained and more realistic descriptionsof regime transformations, they make an important contribution to the literature on political regimes.

  • Issue Year: 5/2016
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 42-59
  • Page Count: 18
  • Language: Hungarian