Abstract
Hybrid regimes started gaining scholarly attention in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Researchers became drawn to these "new" regimes, which were hybrid "grey zones" borrowing characteristics from both democracy and authoritarianism.
From Huntington's three waves of democratization, there was a rise in the number of hybrid regimes, skyrocketing after the 1980s. However, these waves of democratization largely veered towards hybridity rather than democracy, which corresponds with both the data collected and the history reviewed in this article.
Moreover, the surge in hybrid regimes in the 1980s-1990s corresponds with the changes to the post-Cold War world, when the US and the EU expanded democracy promotion abroad with an emphasis on valuing notions like "liberty" and "human rights." Those efforts signified yet another change in politics whereby full-blown authoritarian regimes, which had been backed by the international community, began taking on a new shape, shifting into hybrid regimes to match the new environments. By taking Huntington's teleological assumptions of liberal democracy into account, I conclude that these waves along with the emergence of democracy promotion led to the surge and stabilization of hybrid regimes.