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• Political development: what, why, how? A comparative framework for Hungarian history

  5-26

  Ervin Csizmadia

  Views:

  61

  The essay focuses on the comparative analysis of Hungarian political development before 1989–90. Instead of dealing with the 32 years since the change of regime, the author is interested in how many different interpretations of political development can be identified. The author singles out examples of political development in developed countries (for example the United States) as well as developing countries (those countries which have become decolonized in the 1960s). The starting point of the analysis is that Hungary cannot be described by either the categories used for developed countries or those that are used for developing ones. While the essay recognizes that the measure of progress at all times for Hungarian development is the example of Western development, it does not accept the approach according to which Hungarian development is a “dead-end” because it differs from Western development in many ways. The essay puts forward the hypothesis of the “normality” of Hungarian political development.

• Hybrid regimes and the grey zone: new answers to fundamental problems in the study of political regimes

  42-59

  Attila Gyulai

  Juliane Stein-Zalai

  Views:

  46

  Contrary to widely held expectations, the third wave of democratization has brought about not
  only democracy but also the emergence of many regimes of whichtraditional democratic theory
  cannot make sense. The overwhelmingly dichotomous, teleological, and minimalist approaches
  fail to adequately describe political regimes in the grey zone between outright autocracy and
  full-fledged democracy. In our essay, we discuss the theoretical approaches that aim to grasp
  what has been increasingly called hybrid regimes, namely political regimes that combine
  autoritharian and democratic elements. We point to the theoretical and empirical limitations
  of these efforts and argue that the concept of hybrid regimes is still inextricably linked with the
  concept of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, even if the existing approaches to hybrid regimes
  suffer from a series of shortcomings, by providing fine-grained and more realistic descriptions of regime transformations, they make an important contribution to the literature on political
  regimes.