Post-Soviet Azerbaijan: Transition to Sultanistic Semiauthoritarianism? An Attempt at Conceptualization

Abstract

There have always been ambiguous political regimes: neither fully democratic nor clear-cut authoritarian. These political systems can persistently resist moving toward either democracy or authoritarianism. They live as if they were frozen in a certain temporal sequence of political change. Contemporary political science has a distinct subfield of democratic transitology, which claims to explain different trajectories of political change. However, even the most advanced fivefold categorization of modern political regime types' developed by such distinguished scholars of the transition school as Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) has a serious discrepancy when it comes to uncertain political systems. As a partial solution of the problem of incomplete transitions, they have introduced a new category of sultanism to be used in reference to extremely patrimonial regimes that coalesce around a highly personalistic and dynastic-prone ruler who exercises power at his own unrestricted discretion.In addition, Houchang E. Chehabi and Juan J. Linz devoted a special volume to sultanistic regimes, which was published in 1998. In Sultanistic Regimes, they predicted that sultanism's reemergence should not be ruled out. However, they could not expect their prophecy to be so promptly self-fulfilling. Five years later (October 2003), Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev succeeded in transferring presidential power to his son, Ilham Aliyev. Dynasticism was the first sign that the perception of Azerbaijan transitioning to democracy was at least overly optimistic. Some analysts (Roeder 1994; Mamed-zadeh 2001), took another extreme. They proposed to locate Azerbaijan on the continuum of authoritarian regimes. However, some peculiarities of Azerbaijani regime give us a solid ground to claim that it does not fit the pure authoritarian model.2In the light of these events, how can we treat post-Soviet Azerbaijan? Which conceptual framework should we think of? Currently, these and similar questions are asked about analogous cases where the character of the political regime is ambiguous. In fact, these regimes fall into the gray zone. The concept of the gray zone was introduced as a solution to the problem of identifying the growing quantity of hybrid political systems.The problem of defining the gray zone regimes remains one of the central themes in contemporary transition and democracy studies. In recent years, many political scientists have tried to solve this problem.3 However, there is still no consensus on how to name the hybrid regimes.4 Most recently, Thomas Carothers (2002a) pointed to the uselessness of associating hybrid regimes with democracy no matter which qualifier accompanies it. For him, these regimes are not necessarily transitioning to democracy as transitology simplistically assumes. In fact, they may not undergo any political change at all. Nor do they unavoidably follow the teleological path from authoritarianism toward consolidated democracy. There are some other alternative directions they might choose to follow. Moreover, hybrid regimes can choose not to choose any of the existing directions or, worse, not to move at all.Marina Ottaway joins Carothers's end of transition perspective. Her 2003 book is an attempt to support Carothers's search for a new framework that can fill some important gaps in conventional transitology. Ottaway (2003) inaugurates semiauthoritarianism as an appropriate framework for investigating hybrid regimes. To demonstrate the advantages of her innovative frame, she applies semiauthoritarianism to some real-world cases (Egypt, Venezuela, Senegal, Croatia, and Azerbaijan). Postcommunist Azerbaijan appears in her study as an example of decaying semiauthoritarianism that is moving in an authoritarian direction.5Ottaway's contribution to Azerbaijani studies is immense given the poor state of research on Azerbaijan, despite the increasing interest in Azerbaijan in the Western media and academia concerning the recent developments (see, for example, Mydans 2003; Weir 2003; Holley 2003; BBC News 2003a; Mulvey 2003; and Cohen 2003). …