Hibrid rezsimek és a szürke zóna: új válaszok a politikai rezsimek rendszertanának örök kérdéseire

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 descriptions of regime transformations, they make an important contribution to the literature on political regimes.