Abstract

In a quite dynamic and unsteady modern world such traditional political concepts as «democracy» and «authoritarianism» need to be given with new meanings and to be objectifid in political practice. The non-classical theory of political regimes include category of «hybrid political regime» as well. However, due to diffiult for understanding essence of this political phenomenon and multivariability of its research, the development pace in this fild it is rather low. This article aims at discovering the ambiguity of a hybrid regime and at covering its ambivalent specifiity via the model building. The main task of reaching the goal of this paper is to provide a complex research of democratic and authoritarian subtypes of hybrid regimes. This is to be done by the synthetic unity of the defective democracy and competitive authoritarianism concepts. Using of such methods as neoinstitutionalism, systematic approach, structural-functional analysis and spectral analysis, the method of scaling helped to achieve the aim of this article. Due to the last method, the measurement of the level of democracy and authoritarianism of relevant subtypes of hybrid regime was made. The spectral analysis was used to display the two-way nature of hybrid political regime. The measurement of regimes’ competitiveness is important as well as a tool of epistemology. It is the factor that unites two spectrums of a hybrid political regime. Equally important is making a distinction between the hybrid subtype of authoritarian regime and authoritarianism using the intensity of coercion criterion. The competitive authoritarianism uses means of political coercion of low intensity. The authoritarian type uses high intensity political coercion. Thus, the «pluralism–monopolism» bipolarity serves as an indicator to differentiate and measure the democratic/authoritarian nature of the regime or subtypes of hybrid political regime. Pluralism and monopoly are the principles of organization and functioning of the society in the system of political actors. Law and coercion are dominant ways of governing in different regimes’ types. If in political regime existing democratic institutions are malfunctioning in its institutional setting, such democracy should be considered as a defective one. If competitive «pseudodemocracy» does not shrink from using coercive political means, but they are of a low intensity, it is a competitive authoritarianism. As for the practical value of the results of the article, the most important thing is that the development of different democratization strategies of different hybrid political regime subtypes is becoming possible.