Consolidating a hybrid regime: the case of Georgia under Shevardnadze and Saakashvili

Abstract

This paper aims to further investigate hybrid regimes, which are becoming a more and more analysed topic in political studies. After the pathbreaking article by Thomas Carothers (Carothers, 2002) where he claims that many of the regimes that were considered usually in "transition" were actually proved highly durable and did not move neither toward autocracy nor democracy, other scholars started to be interested in this particular phenomenon as such. In this paper I stem from the definition of Hybrid regimes provided by Leonardo Morlino: "A hybrid regime is always a set of ambiguous institutions […] lacking as it does one or more essential characteristics of that regimebut also failing to acquire other characteristics that would make it fully democratic or authoritarian" (Morlino, 2008:7), in order to investigate how incumbents hold and strengthen power in this peculiar political and institutional environment, without forcefully becoming neither fully authoritarian or fully democratic.