Abstract
The article addresses the issue of the hybrid regimes, specifically variety of concepts of democracies with adjectives, authoritarian regimes with adjectives and their typologies. The phenomenon of regimes between democracy and authoritarianism has been studied mostly after the end of the Cold War and the discussion has came up with a large number of new terms such as competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, illiberal democracy, defective democracy and many others.
Despite different root concepts (democracy, authoritarianism) and different adjectives (e.g. electoral, competitive, semi, defective) the whole discussion shares similar issues, despite the divergence among the terms and variety of definitions of democracy. The article claims that in order to understand the whole debate, it is essential to understand how very categories work and to be clear about the definitions of democracies, since these two variables determine, how the concepts are used on the ladder of generality and how their definitions are constructed, and also how far we can draw a line for democratic regimes.
In spite of the pluralism of the terms and approaches, the articles also argues, that we should exclude regimes characterized as hegemonic authoritarian on one side and polyarchy on the other from the discussion of the hybrid regimes.