UC Riverside

After the Soviet Union’s breakdown and the end of the third wave of democracy, a relatively new form of regime type started to emerge (Hale 2010). This new regime type, which was neither democratic nor autocratic, contained democratic institutions, such as free or semi-free elections, combined with autocratic features, such as the limitation of civil liberties. These hybrid regimes, and their economic implications, are the focus of this project. Despite these regimes’ prevalence, we have very little, and often contradictory, understanding of their nature. On the one hand, the democratic-autocratic combination took many different forms that coming up with a clear defining boundary only became more allusive. The institutional diversity that emerged in hybrid regimes left us with a host of typologies and intermediate types around what constitutes hybridity. As a result, there is little consensus on what hybrid regimes are and how to measure them. And on the other hand, these regimes’ seemingly paradoxical nature indicates that they are not more than a short-lived transitional moment before either “backsliding” towards autocracy or “advancing” towards democracy. In chapter one, I re-define hybrid regimes, create a new dataset based on this new definition, and examine these regimes’ durability. Furthermore, the disagreement around what makes a regime hybrid left us with contradicting conclusions on the nature of these regimes’ economic, social, and political outcomes. Previous scholarship documented the direct and indirect impact of regime types (democracies and autocracies) on economic outcomes (economic growth and income inequality). What remains missing is whether or not the patterns observed in other regime types are still applicable to countries that are neither democratic nor autocratic. Using the new dataset, chapter two measures the levels of economic growth in hybrid regimes, and chapter three examines the impact of hybrid regimes on income inequality. Developing a better understanding of hybrid regimes, especially with an ever-increasing global democratization crisis, is crucial to our policy recommendations and overall knowledge of a new political and economic global order.