The paper relates to the literature on contemporary non-democratic systems with multi-party elections. It aims to prove that electoral competitiveness is a key concept for understanding these systems, but this concept is currently underdeveloped. It first reviews the main approaches of competition and competitiveness, then, using the widely accepted type of competitive authoritarian hybrid regime, argues that the concept developed by its inventors does not provide sufficient support to detect competitiveness, because the factor of uncertainty used by the concept creators to justify its existence is not accompanied by any real indicators. The conclusion of the article is that competitiveness should therefore be derived not from the unidentifiable uncertainty factor, but from the concept of electoral integrity, which indicates the existence or the absence of genuine (competitive) elections, and from the concept and characteristics of electoral manipulations.