How Do Hybrid Regimes Transition to Democracy?

Hybrid regimes are not new. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, there existed multiparty, electoral, but undemocratic regimes. Virtually all hybrid regimes in the world today are quite deliberately pseudodemocratic, 'in that the existence of formally democratic political institutions, such as multiparty electoral competition, masks the reality of authoritarian domination'. If scholarly treatment of hybrid or 'electoral authoritarian' regimes is relatively new, it is not without some intellectual foundations in the transitions paradigm and in other earlier comparative work on democracy. As Andreas Schedler elaborates, the distinction between electoral democracy and electoral authoritarianism turns crucially on the freedom, fairness, inclusiveness, and meaningfulness of elections. No less difficult is the challenge of distinguishing between competitive authoritarian regimes and hegemonic electoral authoritarian ones. Comparative politics is returning with new concepts and data to a very old issue: the forms and dynamics of authoritarian rule. As democracies differ among themselves in significant ways and degrees, so do contemporary authoritarian regimes.

Most political regimes in the world today display some form of mixture of democratic and autocratic institutional features—they are hybrid regimes. This chapter distils from the literature the defining characteristics, commonly discussed types, and causes of transformations of hybrid regimes. It demonstrates how all hybrid regime concepts can be sorted into either one of the two categories of defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism; how all hybrid regime concepts are constructed along the two institutional dimensions of electoralism and constitutionalism; and how explanations of hybrid regime persistence and change fall into four categories: electoralist, nested game approaches, neo-institutional, and non-electoral explanations.

IntroductionThe color in the post-Soviet space initially understood to mean the Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004) and Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005). The one feature these events share is considered to be the non-violent nature of the regime change resulting from mass protests. The 2010 revolution in Kyrgyzstan may also be relegated to this group of cases: although the revolution was not entirely peaceful it nonetheless led to a change in the country's leadership. Somewhat less clear are regime change attempts or mass protests, for example the situation in Andijan (Uzbekistan) in 2005 or the mass protests and riots in Moldova in 2009. It is still unclear whether the power shift in Ukraine in February 2014 should be considered a color revolution; there is also no precise definition of the concept of the spring, which is usually thought to include the mass upheaval and protests, more often not peaceful, that led (or did not lead) to regime change in a number of countries of the Arab world starting in late 2010. Despite the lack of consensus among political leaders and experts regarding terminology, on the whole the terms color and spring have caught on and as a rule are used without further explanation in Russian official discourse in the expert community and in the media.Russia's most recent version of its Foreign Policy Concept, dated 18 February 2013, contains no mention of color or spring either in the list of threats or in the section on regional priorities. The previous version also did not contain an official position on the problem of revolutions in the post-Soviet space. On the eve of the NATO summit of 4-5 September 2014 in Great Britain, information appeared in the Russian news media that Russia would adopt a new edition of its Military Doctrine by the end of 2014, and that an interagency commission had been created under the Office of the Russian Security Council to draft it. In an interview, the Secretary of the Security Council of Russia Mikhail Popov stated that the new version was needed due to the emergence of new challenges and threats to Russia's security, which, in addition, were manifested in the events of the spring, in the armed conflict in Syria, and in the situation in and around Ukraine.1Why did Russia not include the problem of revolutions in its concept documents on foreign policy and security? This is thought to be connected to the fact that prior to the 2014 crisis in Ukraine Russia considered revolutions to be a purely internal matter and did not deem it necessary to state its position regarding events that did not go beyond the sovereignty of those countries where revolutions took place or mass protests occurred. Despite the absence of revolutions as problems addressed in the foreign policy conceptual documents, Russian presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, as well as Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials-most notably foreign minister Sergey Lavrov- repeatedly stated Russia's position regarding the color revolutions, the events of the spring, the Ukrainian events of 2014 and other various mass protests that did not escalate into revolutions or lead to regime change. This article presents an overview of official Russian discourse from the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia to the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, as well as events of the spring.The Color Revolutions of 2003-2005 in the Post-Soviet SpaceThere is an opinion extant among experts that the Russian leadership's primary fear regarding the color is the spread or deliberate export of revolutions to neighboring countries, including Russia. However, in his 2005 interviews Vladimir Putin identifies other problematic consequences of color revolutions:My greatest concern personally is not that some kind of tumultuous events are occurring there, but that they go beyond current law and the constitution. …

الأنظمة السلطوية | الانتقال الديمقراطي | الأنظمة الهجينة | الديمقراطية المعيبة | السلطوية الانتخابية | Authoritarian Regimes | Transition Democracy | Hybrid Regimes | Defective Democracy | Electoral Authoritarianism

Political Risk Analysis (PRA) levels are theoretically postulated to increase in a hybrid regime. This paper argues that there is a change to this hypothesis. A single case research design was employed, using Zimbabwe from 1990 to 2018. During the period, Zimbabwe showed five diverse forms of hybridity which are liberal, competitive illiberal, competitive, illiberal, and military hybrid regimes. A conceptual framework is developed to assess political risk in a hybrid regime using hybrid regime indicators and some political risk factors of most concern to developing countries. 28 key informants from six categories of respondents were interviewed. Illegitimacy, corruption, the staleness of leadership, adverse government regulation, election violence, and severed home-host state relations were confirmed to increase the perception of political risk in a hybrid regime. Investors were observed to have developed a tolerance for some “unacceptable” factors that increased political risk. Military tutelage, weak institutions, flawed elections, military generals in power, undemocratic means to retain power, minimum horizontal accountability and weak rule of law were found to not automatically increase political risk as before. The paper concludes that there is no single form of hybridity and as such different forms of hybrid regimes accrue different levels of political risk, some lower levels while others substantially higher levels. Therefore, in a hybrid regime, a differentiated PRA monitoring, assessing and mitigation strategy will be most effective for management to implement. Future studies can apply the analytical framework of assessing PRA in a hybrid to another hybrid regime to expand the theoretical propositions made by this paper

Reviewed by: Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime Eric Mokube Tripp, Aili M. 2010. Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 223 pp. In Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime, Dr. Aili Tripp opens by discussing the political economy of development in Africa in the context of liberalization, democratization, and economic development. From the beginning to the end, she has done a superb job of flushing out the juxtaposition of politics and economics as well as their impact on overall development. Since the end of colonial rule in Africa, political development has been dominated by authoritarian and military regimes, which have provided few or no liberties and internal progress to the citizenry. When military regimes emerged out of coups d’état to exercise political power, they came with the promise of eradicating varied ills, including corruption, but the new leaders had plans to forge a pathway to progress. Rather than solving the continent’s contemporary political and socioeconomic problems, most of the emerging [End Page 108] military regimes tended to drive the continent into worse suffering, despair, and turmoil. In the 1990s, however, significant changes took place on the continent, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, beginning with a critical shift away from authoritarian and military regimes to less dramatic regime systems, called semiauthoritarian or hybrid regimes. The emergence of these new regime types led to a reevaluation of democratization, which has received mixed reviews in Africa. Some pundits have observed that it has been “a crushing disappointment . . . and although in many ways, it opened up African politics and brought people liberty, it also produced a degree of chaos and instability that actually made corruption and lawlessness worse in many countries” (Fareed Zakaria, 2003, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, p. 98). Others have argued that political liberalization stalled in Africa since the democratization process surged on the continent, leading to civilian-led regimes. Richard Joseph, a distinguished scholar of African politics, is quoted as arguing that democratization was not supposed to happen in Africa because it had too little of what seemed necessary for constitutional democratic politics. Furthermore, the argument is that African countries were too poor, too culturally fragmented, and insufficiently capitalist. Additionally, the contention is that they were not fully penetrated by Western Christianity and lacked the prerequisite civic culture, while the middle classes were usually deemed to be weak and more bureaucratic than entrepreneurial, often coopted into authoritarian political structures. Therefore, African countries constituted infertile terrain for democracy. It is against this backdrop and the context of this shift that Tripp analyzes and articulates the paradox of power in Uganda under the leadership of President Yoweri Museveni, who made the transition and shift from a military-led to a civilian-led regime. The book documents how the dominant political phenomenon of the past forty years has been democratization, the transition from nondemocratic to democratic regimes in various parts of the world—in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and many areas of Asia and Africa. In more recent times, the growth and shift from military to hybrid or “transitional” regimes, especially in Africa, has sparked considerable interest; hence it is no surprise that various labels have been coined for these democracies, including hybrid regimes, semiconsolidated authoritarian democracies, partial democracies, defective democracies, competitive authoritarianism, and electoral authoritarianism, just to mention a few. The end of the cold war posed a fundamental challenge to authoritarian regimes. Single-party and military dictatorships collapsed throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the late 1980s and 1990s. The type of political system that emerged was not democratic because elections were often manipulated: there was unfair media access and constant abuse of state resources. As a yardstick for measurement, regimes are considered democratic if they hold free, fair, and open elections for all the principal positions of political power. [End Page 109] A query ensues: with many countries shifting away from authoritarian to hybrid regimes, how do we distinguish hybrid regimes from democracies? Three clear distinctions have been suggested: first, elections are biased toward the ruling government (that is, state resources are used to promote the...

The ‘third wave’ of democratization has resulted in the proliferation of regimes that are neither fully democratic nor classic authoritarian. To capture the nature of these hybrid regimes, the democratization literature has come up with a wide variety of adjectives as descriptors of different forms of democracy and authoritarianism. This article reviews two of the most systematic recent approaches, centring on the concepts of ‘defective democracy’ and ‘electoral authoritarianism’. An important limitation of both approaches is that each covers only one side of the spectrum. Where they meet in the middle, confusion arises. As a remedy, the article suggests to embed the concepts of defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism in a ‘double-root strategy’ that maps the full range of contemporary regimes from both sides of the political spectrum.

This article analyzes the relationship between the quality of democracy and homicide rates in Latin America. Our hypothesis is that governments with authoritarian tendencies in Latin America do not necessarily have higher homicide rates than those without these tendencies. Our research focuses analyzing the “quality” of democracy in four countries: Brazil and Colombia, categorized as "weak democracies", and Peru and Bolivia, considered "hybrid regimes." Secondary data obtained from the Economist Intelligence Unit, Our World in Data and the World Bank Group websites were used for this analysis. Findings indicate that weakening of institutions is an important contributor to homicide rates in weak democracies (Brazil and Colombia). However, this factor has less of an impact on homicide rates in hybrid regime countries (Peru and Bolivia), where the fragility of democracy coexists with lower homicide rates.

Over the last several decades, elections and parties have become common features of most authoritarian regimes. While recent research on hybrid regimes has often focused on how dictators use these nominally democratic institutions to maintain their non-democratic rule, there is reason to suspect that electoral authoritarianism may pose particular threats to a regime’s stability. Theories of collective behaviour suggest that electoral authoritarian regimes might face higher levels of anti-regime mobilization since parties and elections can help regime opponents overcome collective action problems and coordinate their efforts to challenge incumbents. An analysis of 136 authoritarian regimes over the last several decades indicates that regimes that hold nominally competitive elections are characterized by higher levels of political unrest than those with no elections. Furthermore, election years serve as a focal point for mobilizing anti-regime activity. These findings imply that authoritarian rulers face a trade-off when instituting a system of regular elections; while legislatures, parties and elections provide numerous benefits to incumbents, they also increase the frequency of anti-regime protests and other disruptive, mass political action.

This paper aims to examine regime change in Malaysia post-GE14. It employs the notion of electoral authoritarianism to understand the importance of elections in legitimizing authoritarian rule. As the UMNO-BN regime employed higher levels of electoral authoritarianism over the years, the people began to put pressure on the regime by demanding for greater accountability, transparency and inclusivity. The outcome of the 14 th General Election demonstrated the people’s power and was a crucial first step in restoring the democratic system and ending the political dominance of the UMNO-BN. Yet, more recent political developments in the country, amid Covid-19 pandemic, have raised the concerns of how fragile the situation of regime change is. Based on a qualitative method and analyses from in-depth interviews, this paper argues that while regime change was unexpectedly short-lived, the power exercised by the electorates in the GE-14 has not only substantially weakened the once dominant UMNO-BN coalition but also indirectly contributed to new political partnerships and manoeuvrings in an attempt to remain relevant. Keywords: Democracy, electoral authoritarianism, GE-14, Malaysia, regime change, UMNO-BN

The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia. By Robertson Graeme. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 236 pp., $90.00 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-521-11875-0). Contrary to popular belief, the Russians are not a passive people. Russian workers, for example, can be quite as contentious as their more famously fractious counterparts in Poland and France. As Graeme Robertson demonstrates in this excellent new book, however, the contours of protest in Russia, including its tactics, timing, targets, and objectives, differ significantly from the contentious politics in these other, more liberal societies, largely as a result of the dominating presence of the state. Engaging a growing literature in comparative politics on hybrid regimes, Robertson argues that the presence of both liberal and authoritarian elements in post-Soviet Russian politics has given rise to an equally hybrid profile of contentious politics. This is an important point. Most of the existing literature on this sort of regime—also called “illiberal democracies,”“managed democracies,” or “electoral authoritarianism” (Diamond 2002; Levitsky and Way 2010)—focuses on electoral politics: the reasons such regimes allow some measure of electoral competition in the first place, the strategies they use to ensure persuasive victories, and the risks they run that they might lose. By extending this literature to examine how such regimes manage and shape contentious politics within their society (not always in ways they foresee), Robertson offers …

ABSTRACTOn the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the handover, Hong Kong’s transition towards a full democracy remains unsettled. Drawing upon the contemporary theories of hybrid regimes, this article argues that manipulations adopted by electoral authoritarian governments have become increasingly common in Hong Kong today. As Hong Kong’s elections, opposition activities, and media have been increasingly put under electoral authoritarian-style manipulations, the city-state is now situated in the “political grey zone” in-between liberal authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism and its transition into a full democracy remains nowhere in sight. The case study of Hong Kong will help enrich the existing comparative literature on hybrid regimes by developing a new “in-between category” and offering an interesting case of democratization of sub-national polity.

Since the end of its absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has been variously described as a “hybrid regime,” “flawed democracy,” and “failed democracy.” Furthermore, its governance system has been identified as “electoral authoritarianism,” ‘hybrid authoritarianism,” “military domination,” and “Thai-style democracy.” Regardless of the analytic lens applied, the history of Thai politics has involved a continuing struggle for control of government between both authoritarian and democratic forces. Following the 2014 military coup d’état, the first election held in 2019 saw the 2014 military coup leader, General Prayuth Chan-o-cha, elected as prime minister. This article assesses the conduct and results of the 2019 election in terms of the general discourse on electoral authoritarianism and as an emerging framing of authoritarian regimes particularly applicable to Southeast Asia—the rise of “sophisticated authoritarianism.” This approach distills and integrates the discourse on electoral authoritarianism to produce a typology that is useful for considering the empirical characteristics of Southeast Asia. The 2019 election offers an opportunity to consider Thailand within this framing and to determine to what extent the military-dominated regime and its holistic manipulation of electoral institutions and processes can be assessed as “sophisticated authoritarianism.” This study demonstrates that Prayuth's election partially demonstrates “sophisticated authoritarianism”; nonetheless, his attempt to depoliticise Thailand and reduce it to a non-political state has met substantial resistance that will likely persist while he remains in power.

How do protest movements affect electoral politics in electoral authoritarianism? Related research has usually focused on the immediate effects of protests on regime change, while longer time periods have received less attention. To address this shortcoming, this paper explores the 2017/18 presidential campaign of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, asking how it was related to earlier contentious episodes, beginning with the countrywide protest wave of 2011/12. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data sources, I argue that these protests affected different categories of actors differently. While they clearly provided Navalny with a boost in recognizability among the population, they were less important for mobilizing the online supporters of his 2017/18 campaign. At the same time, previous movement experience appears to have been vital for the political socialization of a significant share of Navalny’s core activists. Considered together, the results attest to the importance of studying the long-term trajectories of protest in stable electoral authoritarian contexts.

Democracy, hybrid regimes, and inequality: The divergent effects of contestation and inclusiveness