Varieties of Limited Access Orders: The nexus between politics and economics in hybrid regimes

Esther Ademmer,Tanja A Börzel,Julia Langbein

doi:10.1111/gove.12414

Abstract

This article advances our understanding of differences in hybrid stability by going beyond existing regime typologies that separate the study of political institutions from the study of economic institutions. It combines the work of Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NWW) on varieties of social orders with the literature on political and economic regime typologies and dynamics to understand hybrid regimes as Limited Access Orders (LAOs) that differ in the way dominant elites limit access to political and economic resources. Based on a measurement of political and economic access applied to seven post‐Soviet states, the article identifies four types of LAOs. Challenging NWW's claim, it shows that hybrid regimes can combine different degrees of political and economic access to sustain stability. Our typology allows to form theoretical expectations about the kinds of political and/or economic changes that will move different types of LAOs toward more openness or closure.

Highlights

The majority of states today are neither fully autocratic nor fully democratic, but stabilized as hybrid regimes combining elements of democracy and autocracy (Diamond, 2002; Levitsky & Way, 2010)
Each is characterized by a balance of access to economic and political resources, the so-called double balance: Open Access Orders (OAOs) are marked by open political and economic competition, as opposed to Limited Access Orders (LAOs) that are dominated by a rent-seeking elite that restricts access to both economic and political resources (North, Wallis, & Weingast, 2009)
Transitologists traditionally stressed the importance of the interplay of economic and political institutions to understand regime dynamics

Summary

| INTRODUCTION

The majority of states today are neither fully autocratic nor fully democratic, but stabilized as hybrid regimes combining elements of democracy and autocracy (Diamond, 2002; Levitsky & Way, 2010). This article wants to understand how hybrid regimes, which are conceptualized as LAOs, differ in structuring access to political and economic resources, what degree of access they allow for, and whether certain combinations of access are more stable than others, using seven post-Soviet countries as an example.. The PCA for political access shows that the first principal component accounts for 64% of the variance and is most strongly defined by variables that capture the prevalence of free and fair elections, political rights, and horizontal accountability This suggests that formal political institutions identified by the literature on democracy and autocracy account for most of the variation in political access between LAOs in our data set. To showing these diverse combinations of access, this article aims to provide insights into the distinct operating logics of these different configurations of political

Balanced closure BY AZ RUS

Findings

| CONCLUSION