Search Results

This chapter analyzes the political future of Egypt and the Arab world, which may include a steady deepening of liberalism and, possibly, democracy. It suggests that a full transition to democracy is not likely in any contemporary Arab regime. However, for hybrid regimes that share characteristics of both an autocratic order and a democratic order, a reversion to full authoritarianism is equally unlikely. In order to understand the future of democracy in the Arab world, we need to understand how these hybrid regimes emerge, why they remain stable, and whether they will transition toward democracy. The theoretical literature on hybrid regimes provides a valuable starting point for this analysis. The chapter presents an analytical approach for studying the emergence of a hybrid regime and applies it to Egypt. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter considers a few challenges to the desirability and superiority of the Confucian hybrid regime, especially the meritocratic elements in this regime that are apparently a significant departure from the present liberal democratic regimes. Some people may object to this regime because it apparently violates what they take as principles of liberal democracy: the principle that the legitimacy of a government comes from popular votes and the principle of equality. This kind of objection is an “external” one because it considers some fundamental ideas of the Confucian hybrid regime problematic. The chapter also looks at some “internal” objections to this regime, such as it will lead to consequences that it considers bad within its own framework, it is not as good as it claims to be, or we do not have to go that far to achieve what is desired by the framer of the Confucian hybrid regime. By answering all these challenges, the chapter hopes to elaborate on the designs of this regime and the reasoning behind it, and to further show the superiority and the desirability of it.

This chapter considers “public” and hybrid regulatory solutions for boilerplate. It first examines the U.S. preference for private, market solutions, with particular emphasis on its tendency to provide for disclosure rather than substantive regulation of boilerplate, along with state legislation and judge-made law that goes beyond disclosure to create substantive regulations of contract law in particular areas. It then discusses issues associated with industry-specific regulation; piecemeal “fixes” to current law that may be enacted through legislation, imposed by agency rulemaking, or developed by judge-made law; and hybrid regimes in which private initiatives would be supported or protected by legislation or judge-made law. It also explores regulation in form of black lists, white lists, or grey lists and the problem of piecemeal adjudication. Finally, it looks at comprehensive regulation by drawing on the case of the European Union.

In recent years there has been growing interest and a related literature on hybrid regimes. Is there a good definition of such an institutional arrangement? Are there actually sets of stabilized, political institutions that can be labelled in this way? Is it possible that within the widespread process of democracy diffusion these are only ‘transitional’ regimes and the most suitable distinction is still the old one, suggested by Linz and traditionally accepted, between democracy and authoritarianism? This chapter addresses and responds to these questions by pinpointing the pertinent analytic dimensions and defining what a ‘hybrid regime’ is. It also disentangles the cases of proper hybrid regimes from the cases of transitional phases and proposes a typology of hybrid regimes. Some of the main findings and conclusions refer to the lack of institutions capable of performing their functions as well as the key elements for achieving possible changes towards democracy.

This chapter shows that there are some fundamental problems with contemporary democracy, especially the ideology beneath the one person, one vote system and the inevitable consequences of it. It identifies four problems of democracy: the suspicion of the elite, the neglect of the interests of nonvoters, the neglect of the interests of the minority, and the irrationality of voters. Then the chapter shows how the “internal” solutions are inadequate. Next, this chapter constructs a Confucian hybrid regime that is based on Mencius’s ideas discussed in Chapter 2, and shows how it can address the problems with democracy more adequately than present liberal democratic regimes. That is, the chapter reveals that the Mencian reservation of one person, one vote is actually a good thing about Confucianism.

Why do we see such variation in the success of democratization across the developing world? Why are some pro-democracy movements successful, while others remain weak? Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the distinct characteristics of democratization in the late Third Wave. Recent democratic transitions have tended to be more protracted and more conflict-prone than earlier transitions in Latin America and Southern Europe. In democratizing countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, incumbents often retain control over the degree of political opening in these “hybrid regimes.” The chapter argues that existing theories of democratic transition are insufficient to explain the dynamics of change in these kinds of regimes. Instead, the strength and cohesion of opposition parties is an important determinant of whether democratization will occur. The chapter introduces the book’s arguments about the sources of variation in opposition strength.

The introduction presents the central question of the book: how and why does a semi-democratic regime collapse without experiencing further democratization? It defines the semi-democratic regime, a subtype of hybrid regimes. It then describes the book's two objectives in answering this question, which it attempts to achieve through a study of the literature on hybrid regimes as well as on prewar Japanese political development. The first is to widen our knowledge of the political dynamics of hybrid regimes. The second is to provide a comprehensive analysis of Japan's political development from the late 1910s to the early 1930s. Lastly, it refers to three comparable cases of semi-democratic regimes: Great Britain in the latter half of 19th century, Brazil between 1945 and 1964, and Thailand between 1978 and 1997.

This chapter focuses on populism in power, distinguishing between populists in government and populism as “the government” (controlling all key institutions). We ask whether the authoritarian logic of populism fosters a change of regimes of constitutional democracy. We argue that once they enter government, populist politicians typically engage in regime change, in three stages. In government they hybridize democratic polities by introducing authoritarian practices into the framework of institutions. As “the government” they tend to create a distinctive populist hybrid that is neither a democratic nor an authoritarian regime. Populist hybrid regimes can morph into full authoritarianism—where elections can no longer be lost and the prerogative state takes over. But such a regime would be at best pseudo-populist. We will call it populist dictatorship to indicate its continuity with the previous types, as well as its form of discoursive self-justification. Each transition raises threshold issues (conceptually and empirically) that we try to address. We engage critically with the literature on illiberal democracy, delegative democracy, and competitive authoritarianism.

This chapter analyzes the roots of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) regime's learning curve in managing popular contention and the mechanisms that have enabled the regime to develop its authoritarian structure and practices. It first defines Hong Kong's hybrid regime in terms of its liberal–autocratic and central–local contradictions and then discusses various state countermobilization strategies used to respond to mass protests. The chapter then examines how the hybrid regime's strategies of disciplinary exclusion, patron-client politics, ideological work, and attrition have mobilized or incentivized proregime and nonstate actors against dissent. On the one hand, the hybrid regime has co-opted formal institutions and has manufactured informal networks through which political crisis has been maneuvered by the regime to monitor the ruling class's factional quarrels and to further develop its authoritarian protocols. On the other hand, the party-state's local apparatuses have extended and refined their united propaganda and mass-line strategies to address the rise of activism in Hong Kong.

This chapter examines the much-debated question of conflict and democratization. It argues that over its first quarter-century the Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry was sustained by the interactions of two hybrid regimes, in which authoritarian leaders were secure enough to secure power but not to enforce unpopular compromise. It then examines the roles of informal power structures and the persistent insecurity generated by prolonged militarised competition. It argues that while the causal relationship between regime type and rivalry is complex, over the long-term insecurity has provided important resources to authoritarian regimes ‘demobilizing’ constituencies for reform and democratic change. The chapter acknowledges revolutionary changes in Armenia in 2018, while highlighting the capacity of enduring rivalries to outlast democratic openings and remain stable across mixed-regime dyads.

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.

What for many years was seen as an oxymoron—the notion of an authoritarian rule of law—no longer is. Instead, the phenomenon has become a cutting edge concern in law-and-society research. In this concluding chapter, I situate Fraenkel’s theory of dictatorship in this emerging research program. In the first section, I turn the notion of an authoritarian rule of law into a social science concept. In the second section, I relate this concept to that of the dual state and both to the political science literature on so-called hybrid regimes. Drawing on this synthesis, the third section makes the concept of the dual state usable for comparative-historical analysis. Through a series of empirical vignettes, I demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Fraenkel’s institutional analysis of the Nazi state. I show why it is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the legal origins of dictatorship, then and now.

Electoral autocracies are hybrid regimes. This chapter explains the nature of their hybridity: They combine institutions of domination with formal institutions of representation. Institutions of domination mobilize violence, money, or ideology. Institutions of representation either empower regime agents by dividing state power (legislatures, courts, and federalism). Or they empower regime adversaries by admitting political pluralism (media, civil society, parties, and elections). On paper, electoral authoritarian regimes introduce the entire set of representative institutions that define modern democracy. In practice, they subvert their democratic spirit through institutional manipulation. The chapter outlines their repertoires of manipulative strategies. It concludes, though, by pointing out the limits of manipulation. The “new institutionalism” in the study of authoritarianism has been analyzing formally representative institutions as instruments of authoritarian rule. By contrast, stressing their relative autonomy and inescapable ambivalence, the chapter conceives them as arenas of struggle.

This chapter considers the fifth lesson: the winner may be “none of the above.” In the prolonged contest between Muslim secularism and Islamism, a number of questions arise: Will one ideology and regime type eventually win? If so, what will the winner be? Or might there be no winner? Western history shows that transnational ideological contests such as that between secularism and Islamism can end in one of three ways: victory, transcendence, or convergence. The chapter explains each outcome in greater detail by focusing on the triumph of democratic capitalism in the late twentieth century, the Dutch Republic's creation of a tolerant constitutional regime, and the end of monarchism versus republicanism in the 1870s. It suggests that the signs at present point to convergence, a hybrid regime of Islamists and secularists that Westerners may find counterintuitive but that may just work in many Muslim societies.

Chapter 6 examines the context of hybrid regimes and argues that the incentive to mimic democracies in this regime type triggers governments to increase the legislative representation of women, particularly when the state is removing civil rights. That is, because of the stereotype that women are naturally more honest, cooperative, and democratic, women’s descriptive representation is strategically manipulated to signal a commitment to these ideals. This theory is tested through a cross-sectional, time-series model of election results of 27 countries over 16 years, which offers evidence that increases in women’s legislative presence in hybrid regimes correlates with a loss of civil rights. Two case studies are also presented, from Ethiopia and Bangladesh, two hybrid regimes that experienced a dramatic reduction in civil rights while simultaneously adopting gender quotas and increasing the presence of women in politics.

This chapter analyses legality in hybrid regimes in Asia, which refers to countries categorized by varying strands of literature as ‘semi-democracy’, ‘competitive authoritarianism’, or ‘electoral authoritarian regimes’. This type of hybrid regime is common in Asia and very much a product of the contemporary world where the functionalities of legality and constitutional law are recognized by not only democratic countries but also authoritarian states. This essay seeks to answer three questions: first, why would authoritarians accept the idea of legality and what exactly do they mean by legality? Second, what makes authoritarian legality functional and stable? Third, what are the factors that provide the conditions for the transition towards a more liberal and democratic system? The experience of East Asian hybrid regimes shows that authoritarian legality and constitutionalism is not only possible but actually exists in many Asian states associated with reputed prosperity. That being said, various limitations exist. It is also theoretically problematic and empirically wrong to assume a linear theory about the trajectory of legality development moving towards democracy.