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Mapping ‘Hybrid Regimes’: Regime Types and Concepts in Comparative Politics

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DOI: 10.1080/13510340701846319

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Mapping 'Hybrid Regimes': Regime Types and
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Mikael Wigell

Online Publication Date: 01 April 2008

To cite this Article: Wigell, Mikael (2008) 'Mapping 'Hybrid Regimes': Regime Types
and Concepts in Comparative Politics', Democratization, 15:2, 230 - 250
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 Mapping ‘Hybrid Regimes’: Regime Types and
Concepts in Comparative Politics
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MIKAEL WIGELL

This article addresses the conceptual challenges involved in mapping political regimes. The
first section offers a critique of regime typologies that adopt a uni-dimensional approach to dif-
ferentiating between political regimes. The second section shows why a two-dimensional typol-
ogy is better grounded in liberal democratic theory as well as for analytically grasping the
empirical variation between political regimes and regime change. The penultimate section pro-
poses a classificatory scheme on the basis of a clear set of defining attributes of the two con-
stitutive dimensions of liberal democracy – electoralism and constitutionalism. Equipped
with this two-dimensional classificatory device the article proceeds in the last section to
propose a regime typology with four main types of regime: democratic, constitutional-oli-
garchic, electoral-autocratic, and authoritarian. This provides a conceptual map in which the
categories and subcategories developed by the literature on hybrid regimes can be located
and analytically related to each other. The last section further divides the category of
democratic regimes into four subtypes: liberal, constitutional, electoral, and limited.

Key words: regime types; ‘hybrid regimes’; electoralism; constitutionalism

Introduction
In the wake of the third global wave of democratization, a wide array of new political
regimes has emerged. Despite important steps towards more democratic politics, it
has become clear that many of these new political regimes in Africa, Asia, Latin
America and the former communist world differ profoundly both from each other
and from the older western democracies. To differing extents, these regimes
combine democratic features with authoritarian practices placing them in a ‘grey
zone’1 between closed authoritarianism and liberal democracy. A central question
in comparative politics has become how to classify these ‘hybrid’ regimes.
This presents students of comparative politics with a number of conceptual chal-
lenges. Most importantly, regime analysts need to solve the problem of creating analytic
differentiation between these diverse forms of political regimes without stretching their
concepts to cases that do not fit reasonable criteria of conceptual validity. This calls for
conceptual innovation in comparative regime analysis. Scholars have stressed the
importance of re-thinking key concepts found in the literature on political regimes in
order to allow for typologies that can better describe these new political practices and
serve as a better basis for cross-national comparison of political regimes.

Mikael Wigell is a doctoral candidate at the Development Studies Institute (DESTIN), London School of
Economics and Political Science, UK.
Democratization, Vol.15, No.2, April 2008, pp.230–250
ISSN 1351-0347 print/1743-890X online
DOI: 10.1080/13510340701846319 # 2008 Taylor & Francis
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 231

This article sets out to tackle the conceptual challenges involved with the mapping
of political regimes. It proposes a two-dimensional typology for the classification
of types and subtypes of political regimes. Recent literature on hybrid regimes
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has made significant contributions to exposing the limitations of uni-dimensional

concepts for describing and analyzing current political practices, and taken important
steps toward understanding variation between political regimes in the wake of the
third wave of democratization. Hence, it is important that any new classificatory
scheme builds on these conceptual innovations. Nevertheless, the literature on
hybrid regimes suffers from its own problems, and it is imperative that these short-
comings are addressed. Indeed, problems have arisen that have led to conceptual
confusion and further unsettling of the semantic field of regime analysis.2
The two-dimensional typology provides a way of systematizing this semantic
field. It builds an integrated classificatory scheme on the basis of a two-dimensional
concept of liberal democracy. The two constitutive dimensions of liberal democracy
are electoralism and constitutionalism. Equipped with this two-dimensional classifi-
catory device, the conceptual space can be expanded beyond uni-dimensional and
aggregated indices of ‘democraticness’ to the entire semantic field of regimes analy-
sis. Accordingly, the article proposes a regime typology with four main types of
regime: democratic, constitutional-oligarchic, electoral-autocratic, and authoritar-
ian. This provides us with a classificatory map in which the categories and subcate-
gories developed by the literature on hybrid regimes can be located and analytically
related to each other, bringing order to the ‘terminological Babel’3 that has marked
the field of comparative regime analysis in recent years. As such, the purpose of
this article is not to actually classify cases, but rather to deal with the challenges
involved with the mapping of political regimes on a conceptual level, although refer-
ences will be made to some relevant cases, especially in Latin America, for illustra-
tive purposes.

Constructing Regime Typologies

This article challenges regime typologies that adopt a uni-dimensional approach to
differentiating between political regimes, typical for most indexes of democracy.4
It argues that political regimes are not necessarily distributed in a linear fashion
along a single continuum. Reducing all differences between political regimes into a
matter of the degree of ‘democraticness’ disregards important categorical differences
identified by qualitative regime analysis, such as ‘delegative’ vs. ‘tutelary’ democ-
racy, ‘democradura’ vs. ‘dictablanda’, or ‘populist’ vs. ‘oligarchic’ democracy.
For instance, the difference between Argentina and Chile in the 1990s is not fore-
most a question of one being more democratic than the other, but that they were
differently democratic. Argentina under the Menem presidency was characterized
as a delegative democracy – a type of democracy with strong institutions of vertical
accountability, but weak institutions of horizontal accountability.5 In Chile’s post-
transitional tutelary democracy the relationship was the reverse – weak institutions
of vertical accountability, but strong institutions of horizontal accountability. In
Asia, Thailand is analytically an interesting case. After having adopted the
 232 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

‘People’s Constitution’ in 1997 designed to provide for a powerful executive, the

regime emerged as a paradigmatic case of a delegative democracy, under the Thai
Rak Thai government. The military that overthrew the government in 2006, justified
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its actions by referring to Prime Minister Thaksin’s ‘rampant corruption [and] politi-
cal interference in government agencies and independent organizations’.6 A new con-
stitution put to a referendum by the military was designed to prevent the re-emergence
of delegative democracy, and instead provide for a tutelary democracy with strong
horizontal checks on executive power and anti-populist measures such as designated
senators. On a uni-dimensional scale such important differences between types of
democracy would remain outside the scope of analysis.
Likewise, forcing the different types of authoritarianism into a uni-dimensional con-
tinuum restrains our ability to understand authoritarian politics. In such a constrained
analytical space there is no room for descriptively richer categories such as bureau-
cratic-, populist-, competitive-, electoral- or liberal-authoritarianism.7 Indeed, on the
Polity IV scale the populist regime of Argentina’s President Juan Perón is given the
exact same score as the military regime that took power in the country in 1976,
forcing these two highly different authoritarianisms into the same category.
Introducing categorical labels a posteriori on a graded, uni-dimensional scale will
not really solve this problem. Using the Freedom House Index, Larry Diamond develops
a conceptual scheme by dividing the aggregate scale into ‘liberal democracies’, ‘elec-
toral democracies’, ‘pseudo-democracies’, and ‘authoritarian regimes’.8 He explicitly
tries to develop a device for differentiating between political regimes both in terms of
type and degree. Indeed, he finds it ‘more fruitful to view democracy as a spectrum,
with a range of variation in degree and form’.9 Nonetheless, the potential gains of
using Diamond’s categories are illusionary, because even though Diamond discusses
his four categories, ‘there is really no way to know whether the scores generated by
Freedom House correspond to his concepts. Indeed, the decision to attach these labels
to different segments of the Freedom House scale are based on an ad hoc and quite arbi-
trary decision’, as Gerardo Munck has pointed out.10 Hence, Diamond’s model appears
no different from other uni-dimensional, graded measures of democracy that only allow
for comparing differences in degree. These studies construct summary measures of
‘democraticness’, as if democratization was uni-dimensional. Although they mark an
improvement from dichotomous classifications of democracy and non-democracy,
they fail to convey how regimes may be differently democratic, or differently authoritar-
ian. As a consequence, Diamond ends up classifying regimes as different as Switzerland
and Honduras as the same type of liberal democracy.11
Nevertheless, the graded approach to building regime typologies has contributed
to our understanding of democratization as a process that may involve crossing mul-
tiple thresholds. And moreover that this process does not necessarily unfold in a teleo-
logical fashion towards a fully fledged democracy: countries may get stuck in
between, in a state of ‘semi-democracy’ or ‘semi-authoritarianism’. Hence, for
many questions concerning the consequences of political regimes and for the under-
standing of politics in the wake of the third wave of democratization, the graded
approach marks an improvement from the dichotomous approach advocated by
such analysts as Giovanni Sartori and Adam Przeworski.12
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 233

Simply classifying regimes as either democratic or non-democratic (or authoritar-

ian) has become too parsimonious. Reality warrants typologies that are more sensitive
to intermediate cases and categories. A dichotomous approach does not achieve
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enough analytic differentiation, as it risks effectively establishing only one type of

regime – liberal democracy – all other cases go into the residual category of
non-democracy.
Furthermore, the dichotomous approach, when insisting on creating mutually exclu-
sive categories, fails to see how there can actually exist an overlap between types of
regimes.13 Clearly, the populist regime of Juan Perón was not a liberal democracy,
but it shared some of the electoral elements that define liberal democracy. Likewise,
the constitutional monarchies of 19th century Western Europe were not liberal democ-
racies, but shared some of the constitutional elements that are inherent in many a defi-
nition of liberal democracy, such as the respect for certain civil liberties and the
separation of powers. The graded approach is clearly better positioned than an orthodox
dichotomous approach to describe such overlap between democratic and authoritarian
regimes. Incorporating gradations into regime typologies has thus contributed to our
understanding of the hybrid nature of many third-wave democracies and how democra-
tization is seldom a one-shot change that occurs overnight. Rather it is a process that
‘emerges in fragments or parts’,14 at a different pace and to varying extents, depending
on the specific conditions of the countries in question. However, if we are to capitalize on
this important finding we need a more nuanced classificatory scheme that neither the uni-
dimensional graded approach nor the dichotomous approach is capable of producing. In
sum, recent classificatory schemes, whether based on the dichotomous or the graded
approach, have not lived up to the conceptual challenges posed by recent political devel-
opments around the world.
The trichotomous approach advocated by Mainwaring et al. does not appear to
fare much better in terms of describing the variation of democratization in Latin
America. In Mainwaring et al.’s classificatory scheme the regime categories are orga-
nized in a uni-dimensional, linear fashion: authoritarianism, semi-democracy, and
democracy.15 Hence, it achieves greater differentiation than an orthodox dichotomous
classification, for it recognises an intermediate category between non-democracy
(authoritarianism) and democracy. But again, the descriptive utility of the classifica-
tory scheme is limited, because the semantic field remains restricted to highly aggre-
gated regime types. For instance, the intermediate category of ‘semi-democracy’ may
include such diametrically opposite regime types as ‘populism’ and ‘oligarchical
liberalism’, both of which are referred to in the literature on Latin American politics.
The same goes for Mainwaring et al.’s two other categories: their descriptive utility
remains limited as they do not differentiate between subtypes of regimes. Operating
only with a minimal procedural definition of democracy, their classificatory scheme
cannot distinguish between diminished subtypes of liberal democracy. As a conse-
quence, post-transitional Argentina and Chile are simply classified as democracies,
disregarding the very different institutional mix for forging democratic accountability
in Argentina compared with Chile. Comparative regime analysis warrants typologies
that account for such differences, both in type and degree. This requires expanding the
analytical contrast space to the entire semantic field of regime analysis.
 234 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

A Two-Dimensional Typology
The problem with all these classificatory schemes is their uni-dimensionality. Instead,
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the classificatory scheme this article proposes in their place is based on a two-dimen-
sional concept of liberal democracy. Such a conceptualization is better grounded in
liberal democratic theory16, as well as doing a better job of analytically grasping
the empirical variation between political regimes and regime change. Theoretically,
liberal democracy is the joining of two distinct ideological traditions: political liberal-
ism and democracy. The goal of democracy is popular government. In the ancient
city-states popular government was organized through the direct participation of
the citizens in their own governance. The contemporary era, however, reflects the
republican re-formulation of democracy in the nineteenth century, whereby democ-
racy came to be seen as representative government in which citizens govern indirectly
through representatives authorized to exercise power on their behalf.17 Representative
democracy is above all a theory about how to insert popular power into government.
Electoralism is a means to this end, it is the mechanism through which the citizens
ensure representation of their interests. This representative relationship is directly
related to the extent that the people can be said to govern itself. Central to the
theory of representative democracy is the argument that regularly held elections
produce governments that are accountable and responsive to the people. In contrast,
the goal of liberalism is limited government. Liberalism is above all a theory about
limiting and controlling the exercise of power. Constitutionalism is a means to this
end, it is the mechanism through which the rule of law is upheld, preventing
popular government from degenerating into majority tyranny, or outright anarchy.
A simplified illustration of the function of liberal democracy can be found in Figure 1.
Obviously, there are synergies between the liberal ideal of limited government
under a rule of law and the democratic ideal of popular government accountable to
the citizens via free and fair elections. Yet, the two are both conceptually and practi-
cally distinct. For analytical reasons they need to be separated. Liberal democratiza-
tion involves at least two distinct processes: the insertion of popular power into the
state through the means of elections, on the one hand, and the limitation of this
power through the means of a constitutional order based on a rule of law, on the
other hand. Empirically, liberal democracy is the synthesis of these two processes –
the electoral popularization and the constitutional liberalization of regimes.
These two processes do not always evolve hand in hand. Indeed, history shows
highly divergent patterns of popularization and liberalization, which reflects the

FIGURE 1
THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC MECHANISM
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 235

fact that the history of liberal democracy is a joining of these two, often antithetical,
ideological traditions: democracy and political liberalism. Nineteenth century
European political history is in many ways a story about liberalizing regimes. It
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saw the gradual expansion of civil freedoms and the institutionalization of consti-
tutional rules for the separation of governmental powers. Absolutist monarchism
gave way to a new form of rule, namely liberal authoritarianism. Only later, at the
beginning of the 20th century, did these regimes find it necessary to insert popular
power into the state by enfranchising larger segments of society and inaugurating
free and fair elections, and thus evolving into democratic regimes. In many ways,
East and Southeast Asia have followed a similar pattern of gradual liberalization
over a long period of time before popularization.
In Latin America the rule of law took longer in coming, while the oligarchy
resorted to patrimonial control of the popular classes, paving the way for populist cau-
dillos to respond to the challenge of bringing the masses onto the electoral arena.
Popularization thus often came swiftly, without liberalization, and with military
coups often as reaction against such populist governance. Argentina under Juan
Perón is of course the paradigmatic case of a populist authoritarian regime in
which the electoral, populist elements are strong, whereas the constitutional, liberal
elements are weak. Venezuela under its current President Hugo Chávez is a more
recent example, and yet more examples can be found in post-colonial Africa.
These examples from modern political history highlight how regimes can vary
along the two dimensions of electoralism and constitutionalism, ‘scoring’ high on
one dimension and low on the other or vice versa. As a consequence, regime
change is best understood as taking place in a two-dimensional space. History
shows that a transition from authoritarian rule does not necessarily follow a linear
path towards liberal democracy or back. Indeed, as Schmitter and Karl maintain,
‘polities moving away from authoritarian rule can mix different components to
produce different democracies. It is important to recognize that these do not define
points along a single continuum of improving performance, but a matrix of potential
combinations that are differently democratic’.18 Building on an earlier model by
Robert Dahl,19 Figure 2 illustrates a two-dimensional space of political regime devel-
opment, in which cases can be located on the basis of how they combine electoralism
(Y-axis) and constitutionalism (X-axis).
This two-dimensional classificatory space provides a descriptively richer device for
the comparative analysis of political regimes and regime change than the uni-dimen-
sional typologies discussed in the previous section. It opens up the analytical contrast
space to the larger semantic field of regime analysis by theoretically allowing for mul-
tiple paths of political evolution through any combination of popularization and liberal-
ization. It recognizes, as critics of ‘democratic teleology’ have pointed out, that
transitions from authoritarian rule often lead not to democracy but to different forms
of hybrid regimes, as has been the case in many parts of Africa and Central Asia in par-
ticular.20 A striking feature of recent global democratic developments has also been the
hollowing out of many democracies, not only through a sudden breakdown of democ-
racy and its replacement by military authoritarianism (as in Thailand, for example),
but also through the progressive decay into some form of hybrid regime, most often
 236 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

FIGURE 2
POLITICAL REGIME TRAJECTORIES
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an electoral autocracy (as in Venezuela and Russia today). The model depicted in
Figure 2 provides a more robust conceptualization of such political trajectories. It
does not aim at explaining regime change, but merely strives for an improved description
of political regimes that is essential for explaining their causes and consequences.
However, the categorization still needs specification as to the boundaries between the
different types of regimes and the specific attributes that define these categories.

Operationalization
Having formulated a systematized concept of liberal democracy by disaggregating
this root concept into its relevant dimensions – electoralism and constitutionalism –
it is now time to discuss their defining attributes. We also need to establish the bound-
aries separating regime types and subtypes from one another. First the minimal elec-
toral and constitutional criteria that separate all democracies from non-democracies
need to be defined. The criteria for defining the democratic minimum proposed
here comes close to standard ‘procedural minimum’ definitions of democracy.21
The defining attributes of political democracy in the procedural tradition usually
involve certain political rights that have do to with the electoral dimension of
liberal democracy, as well as certain civil liberties that have to do with the consti-
tutional dimension of liberal democracy. This latter set of conditions is particularly
important in order to avoid falling prey to ‘the fallacy of electoralism’,22 something
that an exclusive focus on electoral competition would lead to. Below I have listed
eight conditions that must be present for modern political democracy to exist. Attri-
butes 1 to 4 refer to the electoral dimension of democracy – free, fair, competitive,
and inclusive elections are seen as the basic institutions of political democracy.
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 237

Attributes 4 to 8 refer to the constitutional dimension of democracy - the civil free-

doms that are minimally necessary not only during but also between elections in order
for elections to be meaningful. The following coding scheme is proposed here:
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Minimal Electoral Conditions

The head of government and the legislature are chosen in:

1. Free Elections. Voters cast a secret ballot without interference (such as vote-
buying) or intimidation by rival political parties. No evidence of interference, inti-
midation, or violence broad enough to significantly skew the electoral outcome.
2. Fair Elections. Correct and impartial application of the election law. The incum-
bent government does not exclude the opposition from campaigning resources or
access to media. No reports about rigged elections or fraud broad enough to sig-
nificantly skew the electoral outcome.
3. Competitive Elections. The right of all adult citizens to run for office. Opposition
candidates are not excluded from the electoral arena.
4. Inclusive Elections. All adult citizens possess the right to vote. No reports of dis-
enfranchisement on class, gender, ethnic or educational grounds that are likely to
prevent different electoral outcomes, or are unusually exclusionary for the histori-
cal period.

Minimal Constitutional Conditions

The state respects and guarantees:

5. Freedom of Organization. Citizens are free to form and join political parties,
unions, and interest groups, including a vast array of autonomous associations
and movements. No evidence of state actors banning major parties, trade
unions, or interest groups, or that they are only allowed to exist under heavy gov-
ernmental control.
6. Freedom of Expression. Citizens are free to express dissent in discussion, speech,
publication, assembly, demonstration, and petition. No evidence of state actors
systematically punishing or censoring dissent.
7. Right to Alternative Information. Citizens have access to alternative sources of
information which are protected by law. If media is to a large extent state-
owned, they must be controlled by independent or multi-party bodies. Alternative
sources of political information exist outside government or ruling party control,
and dissent is not routinely censored or punished.
8. Freedom from Discrimination. Cultural, ethnic, religious and other minority or
gender groups are not prohibited from expressing their interests in the political
process. No reports of a social group being prohibited legally or in practice
from expressing its interests in the political process, on gender, cultural, ethnic,
or religious grounds that are unusually discriminatory for the historical period.

The above eight defining attributes are necessary conditions for political democ-
racy. However, political democracy, as defined by these minimal requirements, is not
 238 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

a sufficient condition for liberal democracy. Recent literature on democracy and

democratization has identified a number of ‘perverse’ practices and authoritarian
legacies that continue to thrive alongside political democracy in many third wave
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regimes.23 Hence, despite democratization, these regimes do not seem to function

as expected by ‘the feedback theory of democracy’.24 That is to say, the introduction
of democratic elections has not ensured liberal democratic rule. Such ‘defects’ may
amount to making the democratic process ineffective and, by all accounts, a democ-
racy with low liberal democratic quality. Indeed, the literature expresses concern that
multiparty elections, even if genuinely democratic according to these requirements,
may effectively deny some sections of the population from advancing their interests,
or even mask new forms of political, economic, or social repression of significant seg-
ments of the population, typically unpopular minorities and the poor. This literature
has, therefore, suggested that several additional attributes should be checked for when
classifying political regimes. Some observers have even suggested expanding the
procedural minimum definition of democracy to include additional criteria such as
the effective agenda-setting power of elected officials, horizontal accountability
and an effective rule of law.25 These are without doubt important elements of a
liberal democracy. But they should not for analytical reasons be included in the
root definition of political democracy. As Alvarez et al. have argued, ‘maximalist’
definitions foreclose analysis of issues that may be ‘just too interesting to be resolved
by definitional fiat’.26 To equate, for instance, electoral democracy with liberal
democracy would only create parallel concepts while doing away with important
analytical distinctions. Furthermore, raising the threshold of democracy risks unset-
tling the semantic field, by reopening the definitional point of departure from
which many scholars within the field are working.27 Hence, the additional criteria
that analysts like Terry Lynn Karl discuss are better included in a definition of
liberal democracy, to be distinguished from the procedural minimum.
The list below offers eight such additional conditions of liberal democracy. They
amount to readily available criteria for further differentiation between political
regimes.

Additional Electoral Conditions

9. Electoral Empowerment. As democracy is about citizens wielding power,
elections must de facto empower elected officials with the effective decision-
making authority. Yet, the military has often retained the capacity to act
independently of elected officials or even veto decisions made by the citizens’
representatives in certain policy domains limiting the jurisdiction of elective
offices. Specifically, this attribute refers to so-called ‘reserved domains’,28
which are areas over which the military or other powerful unelected actors
such as religious authorities, bureaucratic enclaves, and intelligence bodies
hold constitutionally defined final decision-making power in crucial policy
areas that normally would fall under democratic control. Such undemocratic
power enclaves should be strictly separated from specialized organs such as
the central bank and the court system that have been democratically delegated
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 239

certain autonomous powers and competencies. Reserved domains refer to the

particular cases when the military or some other undemocratic actor in an act
of self-empowerment has been able to impose constitutional prerogatives
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granting itself special privileges in certain areas of policy-making. As such,

this condition requires us to check that popularly elected officials are
empowered with effective decision-making authority in practice, and that
there is no evidence of reserved domains severely limiting the jurisdiction
of elective offices.
10. Electoral Integrity. In a democracy votes should be weighted equally according
to the principle of ‘one person, one vote’. Yet, even in perfectly clean elections,
this principle may in practice be violated through ‘institutionalized bias’.29
Valenzuela stresses how ‘electoral rules may be deliberately designed by
actors who hold power at key moments of the first transition to under-represent
grossly significant sectors of opinion while over-representing others’.30 Snyder
and Samuels have likewise drawn our attention to gross levels of malapportion-
ment in some Latin American legislatures.31 Malapportionment means that the
votes of some citizens will come to weigh more heavily than those of others.
Snyder and Samuels emphasize how a grossly malapportioned lower chamber
may violate the principle of fair elections. Hence, this condition requires us to
check for institutional bias granting incumbents a decisive edge when votes
are translated into seats and whether such biased rules keep an eventual loss of
votes from turning into a loss of power.
11. Electoral Sovereignty. Popular government requires that the elected officials are
able to exercise their constitutional powers. Elections must be meaningful in the
sense of being consequential. Nevertheless, foreign powers, international organ-
izations, religious authorities, and economic conglomerates often want to exer-
cise broad control over popularly elected governments. This issue has become
salient with the development of ‘neo-colonial’ or ‘neo-imperial’ arrangements
in a number of places around the globe. Electoral sovereignty is put in jeopardy
when elected officials need approval from actors outside the democratic process.
Such non-democratically generated arrangements have been referred to as ‘tute-
lary powers’. These are actors that ‘attempt to exercise broad oversight of the
government and its policy decisions while claiming to represent vaguely formu-
lated fundamental and enduring interests of the nation-state’.32 In contrast to
reserved domains, which refer to formal arrangements limiting the jurisdiction
of elected offices, tutelary powers are of more informal nature and their limits
are ill-defined. Tutelary powers intervene in the political process without adher-
ing to any predefined rules. Instead, they exercise influence through informal
channels or through the inauguration of ‘control-commissions’ that exercise
broad, but vaguely defined, control over the conduct of elected governments.
These control-commissions should not be confused with specialized bodies
like constitutional courts, accounting offices, ombudsmen or human rights com-
missions that perform as institutions of horizontal accountability, and therefore
may be indispensable to liberal democracy. As such, this condition requires
that we control for tutelary powers and, hence, find no substantial evidence of
 240 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

elected officials being subjected to broad tutelage by actors outside the

democratic process.
12. Electoral Irreversibility. The democratic method for forming popular govern-
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ment is through elections, which means the winners of government-forming elec-

tions have the legitimate right to exercise executive authority. The winners of
elections ‘must be able to assume office, exercise power, and conclude their
term in accordance with constitutional rules’.33 Losers must accept that the
winners have the legitimate right to wield power on behalf of all citizens. The
electoral mechanism is put in jeopardy when actors, such as the military, intelli-
gence bodies, or paramilitary forces, exert influence through violent partici-
pation in the electoral process. This perverse mechanism takes effect
whenever elections are not seen as the sole, legitimate means for changing gov-
ernment, but when the use of force is seriously considered as an alternative
means.34 Hence, for the electoral method to function as expected by democratic
theory, elections need indeed be seen as the only means of filling elected offices,
and electoral outcomes as irreversible. As such, there should be no conclusive
reports of elected officers being prevented from taking office or from concluding
their constitutional terms through violent participation by non-democratic actors.

Additional Constitutional Conditions

13. Executive Accountability. In liberal democratic theory executive power is con-
strained constitutionally through the classic ‘checks and balances’. Hence execu-
tives are not free to act as they please, but are bound by a set of constitutional
rules that define the division of powers between the branches of government.
This requires the executive to subject itself to self-restraint so as not to encroach
upon the powers and jurisdiction of the other branches of government. In case of
encroachment the executive is held to account by other governmental institutions
controlling and monitoring the lawfulness of executive action, such as an auton-
omous judiciary, the legislature, ombudsmen, auditing agencies, and human
rights commissions. Nevertheless, executives in ‘delegative’ democracies
refuse to subject themselves to liberal self-restraint and frequently encroach
upon the powers of other branches of government. According to O’Donnell, dele-
gative democracies ‘rest on the premise that whoever wins election to the presi-
dency is thereby entitled to govern as he or she sees fit, constrained only by the
hard facts of existing power relations and by a constitutionally limited term of
office’.35 Such a ‘delegative mandate’ is not consistent with the concept of
liberal democracy. As such, the requirement of executive accountability in
liberal democratic theory requires us to check that the executive is indeed
subject to intra-state monitoring, especially by the legislature and the judiciary,
and sanctioned in case of unlawful acts.
14. Legal Accountability. Liberal democratic theory emphasizes the link between
political democracy and a rule of law. All public officials, without exemption,
should be subjected to legal controls regarding the lawfulness of their actions.
For legal accountability to be effective it needs to be monitored by independent
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 241

courts. In order for the judiciary to be able to fulfil this function, its impartiality
and independence needs to be respected by other centres of power and its
decisions enforced. Hence, we need to control that the judiciary indeed fulfils
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the function of rendering public office legally accountable, that its independence
is not undermined by undue political pressure rendering the courts subservient to
the whims of a ‘delegative’ executive, and that it functions in an impartial and
transparent manner.
15. Bureaucratic Integrity. Another important aspect of liberal constitutionalism is
the integrity of state bureaucracies. Liberal democracy requires a civil bureauc-
racy that is relatively independent of partisan competition and particularistic
interests. For liberal democratic procedures to work properly the modern state
must have at its disposal a civil bureaucracy that does not fall prey to attempts
by particularistic interests to impose discriminatory policies and practices, con-
struct clientelistic networks or engage in corruption. When classifying political
regimes we need to control for bureaucratic integrity, which means a bureaucracy
that universally and effectively applies the law in a transparent manner. The prin-
ciple of bureaucratic integrity is undermined in case of systematic corruption,
clientelism, or patrimonialism.
16. Local Government Accountability. Liberal democracy requires that the legality of
the constitutional state is universalistic. This principle demands a constitutional
state that enforces a uniform rule across its territory to which the local governments
are accountable. However, in many regions the constitutional state remains absent
leaving these, often peripheral, regions exposed to situations of lawlessness and per-
sonalistic rule.36 Territories controlled by local warlords or guerrilla bands are only
the most obvious examples of situations in which the legality of the constitutional
state and its exclusionary right to exercise violence is put in question. We also need
to consider sub-national regions where the minimal conditions of political democ-
racy are met, but where these circuits of local power enclaves operate from inside
the state and the democratic process. These are regions where entrenched local
elites make state organizations part of their circuits of privatized power.
O’Donnell refers to them as ‘brown areas’, in other words areas where the
public, lawful dimension of the state is absent, in contrast to ‘blue’ areas with a
high degree of state presence in terms of a reasonably effective public bureaucracy
and a ‘properly sanctioned legality’.37 The problem is not only confined to these
regions, but to some extent will also come to condition governance at the national
level, as these entrenched local powers are represented at the centre of national poli-
tics.38 As such, these ‘brown areas’ come to inject authoritarian interests in national
politics, such as the congress – the source of nationally encompassing legality.39
It is thus imperative that any classification of political regime controls for local
government accountability to constitutional rules. The existence of extensive
‘brown areas’ is evidence of a malfunctioning rule of law.

The electoral and constitutional attributes reviewed above, and summarized in

Table 1, provide us with a ‘checklist’ for classifying political regimes. Coding will
necessarily come to involve subjective choices regarding thresholds, but should
 242 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

TABLE 1
LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC ATTRIBUTES

Dimension Normative Attributes Norm Violation

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Electoralism Minimal 1. Free elections Vote-buying; voter intimidation

2. Fair elections Electoral fraud; restricting access
to media and money
3. Competitive elections Exclusion of opposition forces
4. Inclusive elections Disenfranchisement; suffrage
restrictions
Additional 5. Electoral empowerment Reserved domains
6. Electoral integrity Deliberately biased electoral
rules
7. Electoral sovereignty Tutelary powers
8. Electoral irreversibility Violent participation; elected
officers prevented from
constitutional office
Constitutionalism Minimal 9. Freedom of organization Civil society organizations
banned or heavily controlled
10. Freedom of expression Repression of dissent
11. Right to alternative Censorship
information
12. Freedom from Ethnic or other social group
discrimination prohibited from participating
in political process
Additional 13. Executive accountability Delegative mandate;
unsanctioned encroachment
14. Legal accountability Politicized judiciary
15. Bureaucratic integrity Corruption; patrimonialism
16. Local government Brown areas
accountability

gain reliability from well-specified coding rules and informed judgements about the
extent and impact of norm violations.
The next section discusses the logic behind the aggregation of the individual attri-
butes into an integrated conceptual map with a set of logically related regime types
and subtypes.

Re-aggregation
Types of Regime
The regime typology proposed by this article distinguishes between four main types
of regime. Table 2 shows this categorization on the basis of the defining attributes of
liberal democracy discussed above. This four-fold typology combines the insights
from both the dichotomous as well as the graded approach to political regime analy-
sis. While attentive to gradation and ‘overlap’ between regime types (for example, an
electoral-autocratic regime is more democratic than an authoritarian regime, but less
so than a democratic regime), it still retains the idea of ‘bounded wholes’ – bundles of
attributes forming a coherent whole (such as the ‘qualitative leap’ between
democratic and authoritarian regimes).
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 243
TABLE 2
REGIME TYPES

Minimal Minimal Additional Additional

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Regime Types Electoral Constitutional Electoral Constitutional

Authoritarian 2 2 2 2
Electoral-Autocratic þ 2 þ/ 2 2
Constitutional-Oligarchic 2 þ 2 þ/ 2
Democratic þ þ þ/ 2 þ/ 2

Note: The plus indicates the presence of the bundle of attributes listed at the top of each respective column.
The minus indicates the absence of the bundle of attributes. þ/2 indicates that the bundle of attributes may
be either present or absent.

On the basis of the four-fold categorization Figure 3 shows a two-dimensional model

for mapping political regimes where no corner marks a residual category, but each stand
in logical relation to the others separated by a clear set of indicators. This two-dimen-
sional regime typology allows us to locate regime categories, such as populist authori-
tarianism and oligarchical liberalism as well as their recent offspring, such as delegative
and tutelary democracy, that do not easily fit into a uni-dimensional typology. The
dimensions and attributes of electoralism and constitutionalism provide us with clear
conceptual and operationalization criteria for locating these categories and subcate-
gories, which in comparative regime analysis have often appeared to be ‘problematic’.40
The dotted lines in Figure 3 illustrate the thresholds fixed by the minimal electoral
(horizontal axis) and constitutional (vertical axis) criteria. The category of authoritar-
ian regimes includes cases that fulfil neither the minimal electoral conditions nor the

FIGURE 3
A TWO-DIMENSIONAL REGIME TYPOLOGY

Notes: ‘closed hegemony’ (CO), ‘populist autocracy’ (PA), ‘liberal oligarchy’ (LO), ‘liberal democracy’ (LD).
 244 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

minimal constitutional conditions established above. The ‘pure’ type of an authoritar-

ian regime can be called ‘closed hegemony’ (CH), that is to say a type of authoritar-
ianism where all the minimal defining attributes are missing. Moving upwards within
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this category we may find cases in which some of the minimal electoral attributes are
present (free, fair, competitive, or inclusive elections). Moving rightwards we may
find cases where some of the minimal constitutional attributes are present (the civil
rights and freedoms enlisted above). However, the important point is that neither
the minimal electoral nor the minimal constitutional conditions are fully met,
which confines the case to some form of authoritarianism, whether it is a type of
closed or more ‘enhanced’ form of authoritarianism.
The category of electoral-autocratic regimes includes cases that fulfil the minimal
electoral conditions, but not the minimal constitutional conditions. The pure type
of an electoral-autocratic regime can be called ‘populist autocracy’ (PA), which is
a type of electoral autocracy where all the electoral conditions are met but without
fulfilling the constitutional minimum. Hence, in this categorical space we find
cases that combine the minimal electoral conditions with some or all of the expanded
electoral attributes and perhaps some of the minimal constitutional attributes. Regime
subcategories such as hegemonic-, competitive- and electoral-authoritarianism ident-
ified by the literature on hybrid regimes are perhaps to be found among these cases.
The main advantage with this conceptualization, however, is that it allows us to
locate and logically relate various forms of populist political regimes to other
regime categories. To take the paradigmatic example of Peronism in Argentina, it
seems empirically valid to place the Peronist regime of 1946 – 1955 in this category.
Most analysts of Argentine politics maintain that the Peronist government was elected
in open elections, in other words the Argentine regime met the minimal electoral con-
ditions as stipulated above (free, fair, competitive, and inclusive elections). However,
many analysts certainly hesitate to give a clean record regarding the minimal consti-
tutional conditions in Argentina during that period. This is exactly how an insti-
tutional conceptualization of populism would have it – populist regimes are cases
of unfettered majoritarianism with little respect for constitutional rights and rules.
Perón’s Argentina was an intensely popularizing regime that enfranchised the
entire population and empowered the elected government with wide, but poorly con-
strained, executive power. The two-dimensional regime typology, with its consist-
ently defined thresholds, possesses an important advantage over a uni-dimensional
typology, in that it allows us to conceptualize populism as an electoral-autocratic
regime – a type of regime that scores high on the electoral dimension and low on
the constitutional dimension of democracy. A contemporary example of such a
regime is Venezuela under Hugo Chávez.
The antipode of an electoral-autocratic regime is a constitutional-oligarchic
regime. The category of constitutional-oligarchic regimes includes cases that fulfil
the constitutional minimum but not the electoral minimum. The pure type of a con-
stitutional regime is what can be called ‘liberal oligarchy’41 (LO). This is a regime
type in which all the constitutional attributes are present, including the expanded con-
stitutional conditions, but that does not fulfil the electoral minimum. In this categori-
cal space we may thus find cases such as the constitutional monarchies of the late
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 245

nineteenth century Europe, Latin American oligarchical liberalism of roughly the

same period, and possibly regimes such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong of
more recent date. They all combine high levels of constitutionalism with low levels
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of electoralism.
Finally, in the category of democratic regimes we find cases that fulfil the pro-
cedural minimum of political democracy, that is both the minimal electoral and con-
stitutional conditions. The pure type of a democratic regime is of course ‘liberal
democracy’ (LD). Liberal democracy is the type of democracy that fulfils not only
the procedural minimum, but also the expanded definition incorporating all 16 defin-
ing attributes. The next section will further divide this particular regime category into
its subtypes, in other words, types of democracy.

Types of Democracy
In the conceptual space of democratic regimes (represented by the upper right-hand
‘box’ in Figure 3) can be found ‘democracies with adjectives’ such as ‘illiberal’,
‘delegative’, and ‘tutelary’. These subcategories have been invented to conceptualize
‘reduced’ forms of liberal democracy. In Table 3 I propose a conceptual model with
four (sub)types of democratic regime.
All four subcategories are political democracies as defined by the minimal elec-
toral and constitutional criteria. However, all except liberal democracy suffer from
certain institutional defects, either in the electoral dimension (constitutional democ-
racy), or in the constitutional dimension (electoral democracy), or in both dimensions
(limited democracy). Constructing ‘diminished subtypes’42 of liberal democracy
serves to create analytical differentiation among democratic regimes, without stretch-
ing the concept of liberal democracy to cases that deviate from certain standards and
practices inherent in the idea of liberal democratic rule. As such the model facilitates
comparison among cases both with regard to type and degree of democracy, which
can be applied in a comparative analysis of the origins and consequences of liberal
democratic quality. Figure 4 depicts the typology of democracy in a two-dimensional
conceptual space.
In the category limited democracy there are cases that fall short on some or all of
the additional defining attributes, both electoral and constitutional. It is likely that
most Central American democracies with the exception of Costa Rica as well as

TABLE 3
TYPES OF DEMOCRACY

Minimal Minimal Additional Additional

Types of Democracy Electoral Constitutional Electoral Constitutional

Limited þ þ 2 2
Electoral þ þ þ 2
Constitutional þ þ 2 þ
Liberal þ þ þ þ

Note: The plus indicates the presence of the bundle of liberal democratic attributes listed at the top of each
respective column. The minus indicates the absence of the bundle of attributes.
 246 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

most African democracies fall into this category. In these countries many of the
defects that O’Donnell, Valenzuela and others have described are present. Improving
the quality of democracy in these countries will entail further popularization (improv-
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ing electoral empowerment, integrity, sovereignty, and irreversibility) as well as lib-

eralization (improving executive, legal, and local government accountability, as well
as bureaucratic integrity).
In the category electoral democracy can be found cases that fulfil the additional
electoral conditions, but not the additional constitutional conditions. These are cases
that may show ‘delegative’ or ‘neo-populist’43 forms of rule. Their electoral insti-
tutions are effective for producing vertical accountability, but their limited consti-
tutional institutions fail to produce horizontal accountability.44 Thailand under the
Thai Rak Thai government belongs to this category, as well as South Korea under
the era of the ‘three Kims’.45 Argentina under the government of Carlos Menem,
1989 –1999, is a paradigmatic example of an electoral democracy. His government
blatantly exploited Argentina’s limited constitutional institutions and traditions in
order to impose its structural reform programme. By taking advantage of the legiti-
macy provided by Argentina’s strong electoral institutions and its populist traditions
Menem was able to circumvent the weak constitutional controls provided by a poli-
ticized judiciary. At the same time, however, the sustainability of the structural
reforms was compromised exactly because of these limited constitutional conditions –
a bureaucracy with weak integrity and ‘brown’ legislators46 fighting to sustain their
local power bases through prebendalism.
In the category constitutional democracy can be found cases that fulfil the
additional constitutional conditions, but not the additional electoral conditions.
Hence, these are cases that may show ‘tutelary’ or ‘protected’ forms of rule. They
are a type of democracy with effective horizontal, intra-state checks and balances,

FIGURE 4
A TWO-DIMENSIONAL TYPOLOGY OF DEMOCRACY
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 247

but limited opportunities for citizens to enforce responsiveness of the elected officials
to their immediate demands. Post-Pinochet Chile is a paradigmatic case of such a con-
stitutional democracy. The democratic opposition to Pinochet was forced by the out-
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going authoritarian regime to accept conditions placed in the military constitution that
guaranteed a number of reserved policy domains and reserved positions in the Senate
to military appointees, as well as a grossly biased electoral system granting a decisive
edge to conservative candidates when votes are translated into seats. On top of that, a
National Security Council was inaugurated with its jurisdiction vaguely defined as
serving ‘the national interest’, but in reality functioning as a tutelary power ‘protect-
ing’ the regime from resorting to populism. It is also what the Thai military that over-
threw the Thai Rak Thai government seems to aspire. On the other hand, the Chilean
post-authoritarian regime has benefited from a very strong tradition of liberal-
constitutionalism and effective institutions of horizontal accountability. In fact,
with regard to the additional conditions of constitutionalism, Chile is an interesting
outlier in a region better known for populism than liberal-constitutionalism.
Whether this can explain some of Chile’s post-authoritarian socio-economic
success and stability is an intriguing question, not least when set against the socio-
economic crises to which Argentina’s electoral democracy has been prone.
Lastly, in the category liberal democracy can be found cases that fulfil all the
additional electoral and constitutional criteria. It is unlikely that many liberal democ-
racies exist in Africa. In Latin America, Uruguay and Costa Rica are possibly liberal
democracies. In Asia, at least Japan and Taiwan seem to belong to this category.
Liberal democracies depict high democratic quality and it seems reasonable to
expect that cases of liberal democracy will endure as stable democracies for a good
while longer. These do not suffer from any of the defects discussed above and can
thus be considered consolidated.

Conclusion
The field of comparative regime analysis has seen an enormous proliferation of
‘regimes with adjectives’, that employ qualifiers to highlight the hybrid or mixed
character of regimes in which democratic features to varying extents are combined
with authoritarian practices. However, these concepts have rarely been specified
according to logically consistent rules and it remains largely unclear how these
concepts relate to each other. The outcome has often been conceptual ambiguity
and empirical confusion over how to engage in conceptual travelling, obscuring the
precise lines along which comparisons are to be made.
The two-dimensional regime typology proposed in this article provides a device
for analytically locating these hybrid regimes and for ordering the semantic field of
comparative regime analysis. Based on a two-dimensional conceptualization of
liberal democracy it proceeds to create diminished subtypes that are logically
related to each other on the basis of a clear set of defining attributes. As such, it pro-
vides an analytically richer device for comparing political regimes and regime qual-
ities than uni-dimensional typologies. In addition to a simple graded, uni-dimensional
scale that only answers the question of ‘more or less’, diminished subtypes convey
 248 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

sharper, more disaggregated differentiation regarding ‘more or less of what’.47 The

typology proposed in this article provides a more nuanced understanding of the vari-
ations between regimes, and how different types of regimes may indeed overlap, by
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introducing such diametrically opposite regime categories as electoral-autocracy vs.

constitutional-oligarchy, as well as subcategories such as electoral vs. constitutional
democracy. This serves to combine insights from both the dichotomous as well as the
graded approach, offering considerable analytical advantage over the conventional
uni-dimensional regime typologies that hitherto have come to dominate the field of
comparative regime analysis.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is indebted to Gerardo Munck, Kenneth Shadlen and the two anonymous reviewers for their
helpful comments. Financial support from the Academy of Finland is gratefully acknowledged.

NOTES

1. Thomas Carothers, ‘The End of the Transition Paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 1
(2002), pp. 5–21.
2. Various scholars have expressed their concern over the conceptual confusion resulting from the enor-
mous proliferation of concepts based on qualifying adjectives. It is argued that these concepts are often
inconsistently defined and rarely specified as to how they relate to other concepts. See, for instance:
Ariel C. Armony and Hector E. Schamis, ‘Babel in Democratization Studies’, Journal of Democracy,
Vol. 16, No. 4 (2005), pp. 113–28; David Collier and Steven Levitsky, ‘Democracy with Adjectives:
Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research’, World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 2 (1997), pp. 430–51;
Gerardo L. Munck, ‘Disaggregating Political Regime: Conceptual Issues in the Study of Democratiza-
tion’, Kellogg Institute Working Paper Series, Working Paper #228 (1996).
3. Armony and Schamis (note 2).
4. Some notable examples of such indexes of democracy include: Kenneth A. Bollen, ‘Issues in the Com-
parative Measurement of Political Democracy’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 45, No. 3 (1980),
pp. 370– 90; Michael Coppedge and Wolfgang H. Reinicke, ‘Measuring Polyarchy’, Studies in Com-
parative International Development, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1990), pp. 51–72; Axel Hadenius, Democracy and
Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Tatu Vanhanen, ‘A New Dataset for
Measuring Democracy, 1810–1998’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2000), pp.
251 –65; and the Polity Dataset (http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/polity/). The Freedom House Index
(http://www.freedomhouse.org/) is also widely used as a measure of democracy, although it is strictly
speaking a measure of ‘freedom’, rather than democracy. For an excellent review of the various indexes
of democracy, see Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, ‘Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy.
Evaluating Alternative Indices’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2002), pp. 5–34.
5. Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Delegative Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1994), pp.
55 –69; also Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
6. William Case, ‘Democracy’s Quality and Breakdown: New Lessons from Thailand’, Democratization,
Vol. 14, No. 4 (2007), pp. 622–42, 636.
7. For a discussion of some of these authoritarianisms with adjectives, see the collection of essays ‘Elec-
tions Without Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2002), pp. 21–80, with contri-
butions from Larry Diamond, Andreas Schedler, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, and Nicolas
van de Walle. For the seminal elaboration of the concept ‘bureaucratic-authoritarianism’, as well as
for some of the traits inherent in ‘populist-authoritarianism’, see Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization
and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1973).
8. Diamond, Developing Democracy (note 5).
9. Larry Diamond, ‘Democracy in Latin America: Degrees, Illusions, and Directions for Consolidation’,
in Tom Farer (ed.), Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 53.
 MAPPING ‘HYBRID REGIMES’ 249

10. Gerardo L. Munck, ‘The Regime Question: Theory Building in Democracy Studies’, World Politics,
Vol. 54, No. 1 (2001), pp. 119–44, 125–6.
11. Diamond, Developing Democracy (note 5), p. 279.
12. Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1987); Adam
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Przeworski, et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World,
1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
13. For a discussion, see Pierre Ostiguy, ‘Populism, Democracy, and Representation: Multidimensional
Concepts and Regime Types in Comparative Politics’, Paper presented at the 2001 LASA Conference,
Washington DC, 6–8 September 2001.
14. Diamond, Developing Democracy (note 5), p. 16.
15. Scott Mainwaring, Daniel Brinks, and Anı́bal Pérez-Linán, ‘Classifying Political Regimes in Latin
America, 1945–1999’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2001),
pp. 37–65.
16. Sartori (note 12) provides an excellent review of liberal democratic theory.
17. See John Dunn, Setting the People Free. The Story of Democracy (London: Atlantic Books, 2005). This
is not to ignore the normative appeal of the participatory model of democracy, but only to acknowledge
that contemporary democracies have followed the republican trajectory, but for a few partial exceptions
such as Switzerland. It is the institutions and mechanisms of representative democracy that are the main
objectives of recent comparative literature on hybrid regimes and democratization.
18. Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, ‘What Democracy Is . . . And Is Not’, Journal of Democ-
racy, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1991), pp. 75–88, 83.
19. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971).
20. Carothers (note 1).
21. On procedural minimum definitions, see Collier and Levitsky (note 2).
22. Terry L. Karl, ‘The Hybrid Regimes of Central America’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1995),
pp. 72–86.
23. For instance, Andreas Schedler, ‘The Menu of Manipulation’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2
(2002), pp. 36–50; Juan E. Méndez, Guillermo O’Donnell and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (eds), The
(Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre Dame, IL: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1999); Karl (note 22); Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘On the State, Democratization,
and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist
Countries’, in Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization (Notre
Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 133 –57; J. Samuel Valenzuela, ‘Democratic
Consolidation in Post-Transitional Settings: Notion, Process, and Facilitating Conditions’, in
Scott Mainwaring et al. (eds), Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American
Democracies in Comparative Perspective (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press,
1992), pp. 57– 104.
24. According to Giovanni Sartori, theories of democracy in the procedural tradition work from the
assumption that electoral competition produces democratic consequences because of the feedback
mechanism produced by elected officials’ anticipated reactions. Sartori explains this logic as
follows: ‘Elected officials seeking reelection (in a competitive setting) are conditioned, in their
deciding, by the anticipation (expectation) of how electorates will react to what they decide’. From
this perspective, ‘Democracy is the by-product of a competitive method for leadership recruitment’.
Sartori (note 12), pp. 152–3.
25. For instance, Terry L. Karl, ‘Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America’, Comparative Politics,
Vol. 23, No. 1 (1990), pp. 1–21.
26. Mike Alvarez et al., ‘Classifying Political Regimes’, Studies in Comparative International Develop-
ment, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1996), pp. 3– 36, 18.
27. Collier and Levitsky (note 2).
28. For a discussion, see Valenzuela (note 23). Also Schedler (note 23).
29. Schedler (note 23).
30. Valenzuela (note 23), p. 67.
31. Richard Snyder and David Samuels, ‘Devaluing the Vote in Latin America’, Journal of Democracy,
Vol. 12, No. 1 (2001), pp. 146–59. See also Schedler (note 23), p. 45.
32. Valenzuela (note 23), pp. 62–3.
33. Schedler (note 23), p. 41.
34. Valenzuela (note 23). See also Hans-Joachim Lauth, ‘Informal Institutions and Democracy’, Democra-
tization, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2000), pp. 21–50, 37.
35. O’Donnell, ‘Delegative Democracy’ (note 5), p. 59
 250 DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION

36. See O’Donnell, ‘On the State’ (note 23); Jonathan Fox, ‘The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to
Citizenship: Lessons from Mexico’, World Politics, Vol. 46, No. 2 (1994), pp. 151 –84; Edward
L. Gibson, ‘Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Democratic Countries’, World Politics,
Vol. 58, No. 1 (2005), pp. 101–32.
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37. O’Donnell, ‘On the State’ (note 23), p. 139.

38. O’Donnell, ‘On the State’ (note 23).
39. Ibid.
40. A related question concerns regime quality. The typology assumes popularization and liberalization to
improve democratic quality by strengthening formal democratic procedures (i.e., electoralism and con-
stitutionalism). The categorization is not concerned with the question what may constitute ‘authoritar-
ian quality’. From a normative standpoint, ‘high quality authoritarianism’ relates to substantive
outcomes, not formal procedures. The effectiveness of different political regimes to realize substantive
goals is a question for empirical analysis.
41. ‘Liberal oligarchy’ is advanced here as a more universal concept than Latin American ‘oligarchical lib-
eralism’, that usually only refers to a certain period in Latin American history. In practice, the actual
cases of that period also fall short of ‘liberal oligarchy’ as an ideal type.
42. For a discussion, see Collier and Levitsky (note 2). ‘Diminished subtypes’ are not full instances of a
root concept, in this case the concept of liberal democracy, although some of the attributes defining
the root concept are identified as present.
43. For a discussion of ‘neo-populism’ as a regime type, see Kurt Weyland, ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept:
Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2001), pp. 1–22.
44. The concept of accountability has emerged as one of the key issues in comparative regime analysis.
This re-emergence of accountability as key for understanding and improving democratic quality was
to a large extent influenced by O’Donnell, who conceptualized accountability as running in two direc-
tions, vertical and horizontal. See Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Horizontal Accountability in New Democra-
cies’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1998), pp. 112 –26.
45. See Aurel Croissant, ‘Legislative Powers, Veto Players, and the Emergence of Delegative Democracy:
A Comparison of Presidentialism in the Philippines and South Korea’, Democratization, Vol. 10, No. 3
(2003), pp. 68–98; Hyug Baeg Im, ‘Faltering Democratic Consolidation in South Korea: Democracy at
the End of the “Three Kims” Era’, Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 5 (2004), pp. 179–98.
46. O’Donnell describes the interests of ‘brown’ legislators as limited to ‘sustain the system of privatized
domination that has elected them, and to channel toward the system as many state resources as possible.
The tendency of their vote is, thus, conservative and opportunistic. For their success they depend on the
exchange of “favors” with the executive and various state bureaucracies and, under weakened execu-
tives that need some kind of congressional support, they often obtain the control of state agencies that
furnish those resources. This increases the fragmentation (and the deficits) of the state – the brown
spots invade even the bureaucratic apex of the state’. O’Donnell (note 23), p. 140.
47. David Collier and Robert Adcock, ‘Democracy and Dichotomies: A Pragmatic Approach to Choices
about Concepts’, Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 2 (1999), pp. 537–65, 561.

Manuscript accepted for publication November 2007.

Address for correspondence: Mikael Wigell, Development Studies Institute (DESTIN), London School
of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom.
E-mail: [email protected].

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