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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

  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.

• Neo-Hobbesian democracy: The theory of modus vivendi and democratic legitimacy

  25-41

  Milán Pap

  Views:

  24

  In political theory, the criticism of Rawlsian constructivist liberalism has been articulated in
  theories of political realism. John Gray, one of the promoters of realist liberalism, recommends
  a neo-Hobbesian way of social coexistence which is based on the conflictual and antagonistic
  idea of political life. It takes social values and forms of life as incommensurable in modern
  multicultural societies. Taking value-pluralism and its conflicts seriously, a theory of modus
  vivendi has been articulated among realist political thinkers. Being a post-liberal (or post-Enlightenment) theory, modus vivendi is more a practice oriented and open-ended theory than
  philosophical constructions based on high morality. Modus vivendi theorists make an emphasis
  on the peaceful co-existence of social groups and a moral minimum of the political society. One of
  the deficiency of the theory is that it says not much about democracy, though it would be highly
  useful according to two contextual considerations.On the one hand, a modern political system
  would be impossible or outrageous without any form of democratic legitimacy. On the other
  hand, there is an exhaustion of the liberal project(s) and the societies featured by multicultural
  prosperity. Besides constitutional protection, defending democracy in this new context means
  balancing between cultural and other value-oriented groups in modern societies. In my paper,
  I make an attempt to examine the concept of democracy in the light of modus vivendi theory.

• Conflicts and democracy: Considerations on political conflicts and the need of their delimitation

  8-24

  Szilvia Horváth

  Views:

  35

  According to our common experience of political life, the relationship between politics and
  conflicts seems to be obvious. However, it is also common to think about delimiting the intensity
  of conflicts in a democratic context. This kind of complexity of the relation of democracy and
  conflicts can be cexplained from two theoretical perspectives. First, in order to protect democratic
  order, conflicts may lose their relevance in comparison to the value of consent or compromise. Second, even if we accept the importance of conflicts, we also should take into account the limits
  of their intensity. These theoretical problems arise in the context of contemporary politics which
  nature is eminently public and in which every announcement is open to discussion. This is what
  discourse as a theoretical horizon means. The core concept for theorizing the conflictual character
  of politics in a discursive manner is political debate. The article explores three kinds of debate
  and communicative conflicts: John Stuart Mill, as a classical nineteenth century liberal, sheds
  light on the importance of debate in issues of collective truth-seeking and emotional devotion
  to our personal values. Márton Szabó, a leading theorist of political discourse in Hungary, also
  treats debate as a core concept of political discourse studies, and theorizes debate not only as
  a series of singular acts in the realm of politics, but as a mode of existence of politics itself.
  Contrary to other contemporary ideas of communication and politics, discourse is therefore
  inherently conflictual in its character. Similarly, but more embedded in contemporary debates
  over democracy, Chantal Mouffe, one of the eminent theorists of agonism, interprets conflicts
  in the context of democratic order, and emphasises the democratic conditions for constructing
  democratic identities. Her ideas on agonistic democracy can fathom the relation of valuable
  conflicts and their limits in a democratic regime.