Venezuela under Maduro: A Different Kind of Hybrid Regime

Abstract

One of the specific characteristics of the contemporary world is the frequent occurrence of competitive authoritarianism, a new kind of political regime in which democratic institutions formally exist, but abuse by power holders skews the playing field against opponents. Recently, researchers have often been highlighting the difficulty to discern competitive authoritarianism from liberal democracy, which leads to intellectually unsustainable concept-stretching that weakens our ability to understand political processes. Also, a no less important flaw of past studies on this topic is the insufficient analysis of civil-military relations, due to which a different kind of hybrid regime, namely the tutelary regime, is often marked as competitive authoritarianism. In the present study, this problem is demonstrated with analysis of the political regime of Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. The results of the analysis clearly show that researchers should pay more attention to the nature of civil-military relations when classifying political regimes in the grey zone.