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

  42-59

  Attila Gyulai

  Juliane Stein-Zalai

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  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.