“Post-Cold War hybrid political systems - a study into the nature of competitive authoritarian regimes”

One of the striking features of the recent era of the third wave of democratization is the unprecedented growth in the number of regimes that are neither clearly democratic nor traditional autocratic, if we adopt an accurate criterion for them, the proportion of “illiberal” regimes has increased. Within the minimum conditions under which non-democratic regimes are divided into those that include multiparty electoral competition of some kind. The time has passed when questions and discussions about the classification of political systems were simple. The empirical reality in many countries is more complex than it was before. Some fundamental questions in political science have been subjected to careful examination as to which systems constitute democracies and which do not. We have many There is a wealth of definitions, criteria, and means of measurement, but the truth is, a quarter of a century after the start of the “third wave” of democracy and the renaissance it established in comparative democratic studies, there is still far from a consensus on what constitutes “democracy.” The difficulty remains in seeking to classify ambiguous regimes specifically as hybrid regimes as “competitive authoritarianism.”