Beyond Hybridology: A Triangular Conceptual Space of RegimesSpace of Regimes

Staying on the conventional democracy-dictatorship axis of hybridology, we would be unable to reflect on the societal and rulership dimensions that the stubborn structures operate in. For the conventional axis focuses on the level of impersonal institutions, whereas stubborn structures concern both that level and the level of personal connec-tions. Hence, such a dual-level approach [à 7.3.4.1] is needed for the conceptualization of post-communist regimes, for it is only then that we can see regime as a phenomenon that encompasses the political, economic and communal spheres of social action.¹⁰³ To put it this way, the single-level approach of hybridology is able to assess the lack of separation of the branches of power in a political regime, but not the lack of separation of the spheres of social action that leads to it (among other things).

Following a dual-level approach, it is possible to upgrade the hybridological ap-proach with the insight of stubborn structures by defining ideal type regimes and spanning a conceptual space for the conceptualization of polities with them. In line with our conceptu-alization methods, the typology in the literature of post-communism that is the most suitable for upgrading is the conceptual continuum of János Kornai.¹⁰⁴ As we mentioned in the Introduction, Kornai’s work signifies a break with the transition paradigm when, in providing the typology of the institutional system of post-communist regimes, he defines democracy, autocracy and dictatorship as distinct ideal types.¹⁰⁵ Doing so, he proposes two sets of char-acteristics: primary ones (Table 1.5) and secondary ones (Table 1.6), which are in a hierarchi-cal as well as causal relationship with each other. As Kornai writes, “primary characteristics determine the system as a whole, including secondary characteristics. The joint presence of the primary characteristics is a necessary and sufficient condition for the appearance of the secondary ones. […] A sensible first stage when beginning to study a country is to concentrate on these primary characteristics. The results of doing so will then have predictive force. How-ever, the primary characteristics do not generate all the secondary ones in a deterministic way.

The effect is stochastic. There is a very good chance of finding the secondary characteristics in a country examined if the primary characteristics have already been identified.”¹⁰⁶

103 For the definition we use throughout the book for “regime,” see Chapter 2 [à 2.2.1].

104 Kornai, “The System Paradigm Revisited.”

105 Following Kornai, we will too use “autocracy” instead of terms like “authoritarianism,” widespread in the literature of hybridology. Yet in Chapter 7 we will explain how we accept the typology of hybridology, too, as constituting one dimension along ten others in our framework [à 7.2.2].

106 Kornai, “The System Paradigm Revisited,” 28.

1.6. Beyond Hybridology: A Triangular Conceptual Space of Regimes • 63 Table 1.5. Primary features of ideal typical democracy, autocracy, and dictatorship. Source: Kornai (2019, 38).

No. Democracy Autocracy Dictatorship

1 The government can be removed through a peaceful and civilized procedure

The government cannot be removed through

a peaceful and civilized procedure The government cannot be re-moved through a peaceful and

guaran-tee accountability are either formal or weak Institutions which could allow/

guarantee accountability do not

multi-ple parties run for elections No legal parliamentary opposition;

only one party runs for elections

4

No terror (large-scale deten-tion in forced-labor camps and executions)

No terror (large-scale detention in forced- labor camps and executions), but various means of coercion are occasionally used against political adversaries (imprisonment with false allegation, or even politically motivated murder)

Terror (large-scale detention in forced-labor camps and executions)

Table 1.6. Secondary features of democracy, autocracy, and dictatorship. Source: Kornai (2019, 39).

No. Democracy Autocracy Dictatorship

5 No repressive means are used

against parliamentary opposition Repressive means are used against

parlia-mentary opposition No parliamentary opposition

6 Institutions of “checks and balances”

are active and independent Institutions functioning as “checks and

bal-ances” are weak and non-independent No institutions have been created to act as “checks and balances”

7 Relatively few officials are ap-pointed by the ruling political group

The ruling political group appoints its own

cadres to virtually all important offices The ruling political group appoints its own cadres to all important offices

8 Civil protest against the govern-ment has no legal boundary;

strong civil society

Civil protest against the government has no

legal boundary; weak civil society Civil protest against the govern-ment is prohibited by law

9

Interested persons and their organizations take part in many forms and to relevant degrees in preparations for decision-making (significant levels of participation)

There are legal frameworks for participation

but they are practically dysfunctional Participation is not even formally prescribed

10 Freedom of the press is guaranteed

by law, and is actually enforced Freedom of the press is constrained by legal

and economic means No freedom of the press

Kornai’s ideal types extend two conceptual continua: between democracy-autocracy and autocracy-dictatorship, and actual regimes can be placed nearest to the ideal type they are

64 • 1. Stubborn Structures

the most similar to [à Introduction]. As it can be seen in the two tables above, the ten vari-ables Kornai offers for defining the three regime types focus purely on political institu-tions, that is, the sphere of political action. These include governmental instituinstitu-tions, checks and balances, the party system, elections, and various political freedoms from freedom of speech to the freedom of association and protest.

Table 1.7. Post-communist countries of Eurasia by political institutional system (as of 2019). Source:

modified from Kornai (2019).

Democracies Autocracies Dictatorships

Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmeni-stan, Uzbekistan

China, Vietnam

Naturally, no regime in reality meets all criteria of either ideal type. Using Kornai’s ideal types as points of reference, however, we can classify post-communist countries, based on which ideal typical political system their regimes are the closest to. Table 1.7 shows the list resulting from this exercise. Yet in perusing the lists of the countries, in spite of the clear-cut criteria, a sense of uncertainty nevertheless is bound to prevail. For though the Western post-communist countries may be called democracies when compared to the post-communist autocratic regimes, if they are pitted against the Western liberal de-mocracies, it becomes palpably clear that the natures of the democracies in question are dissimilar. More precisely, sorting the countries into the three clusters of democracy, autocracy and dictatorship provides neat and homogeneous categorization accord-ing to the political sphere, as defined by Kornai’s ten variables. Indeed, Kornai did not want more than this, his declared purpose being the identification of alternative forms of politics and government.”¹⁰⁷ But if we look at the countries by their sociological and economic structures, which collude with the political regime as spheres of social action in the post-communist region, countries in the same cluster show a great deal of hetero-geneity. Indeed, distinct regime types can be noticed, between which not the apparent formal political institutional setup is the dividing line but the socio-economic structures presented above.

Utilizing the dual-level approach in general and the stubborn structures argu-ment in particular, we can introduce 2–2 subtypes for each Kornaian ideal type.¹⁰⁸ The grounds on which the difference can be established between democracies are to be found in the prevalent level of patronalism. A conceptual continuum can be drawn within the category of democratic countries from liberal democracies to patronal democracies on

107 Kornai, “The System Paradigm Revisited”, 35.

108 Exact definition of the two times three ideal type regimes would require the exact definition and delimitation of their components, which will be done in Chapters 2–6. At this point, we can only give a broad description of the regime types, whereas a more accurate picture will be provided in Chapter 7 [à 7.2.1].

1.6. Beyond Hybridology: A Triangular Conceptual Space of Regimes • 65 this basis. In liberal democracies, the above-cited traits of democracies as set out by

Kor-nai serve to balance the formally defined civil institutions, while in patronal democra-cies they strike a balance between the competing informal patronal networks. Divid-ing the democracy-autocracy continuum into a two-part continuum along these lines, countries like Estonia and the Czech Republic would be found in the first continuum between liberal and patronal democracy, relatively close to the liberal ideal type, while other countries like Ukraine and Moldova would be on the patronal democracy-autoc-racy continuum but rather close to the ideal type of patronal democdemocracy-autoc-racy [à 7.3]. In the latter countries, what separates them from autocracies that feature a single-pyramid ar-rangement of power networks is that no patronal network has succeeded in consolidating a dominant, monopoly position in either country. Though attempts were made to establish one, social resistance limited the positions of the patronal networks claiming a monopoly on power and established a new dynamic balance between the various competing patronal networks [à 7.3.4].

Similarly, we can define two subtypes of the Kornaian ideal type of autocracy as well: conservative autocracy and patronal autocracy. The mainstream hybridology ap-proach in general and Kornai’s concept of autocracy in particular are most satisfactory for the former type, for a conservative autocracy embraces the invasion of political institutions and the monopolization of political sphere for political goals, power and ideology, while keeping the sphere of market action separated from that of political action. (The only part of market action that it incorporates is state companies and me-dia, that is, the parts which formally belong to the public sphere anyway.) An attempt at establishing such a conservative autocracy has been taking place since 2015 in Poland, where the concentration of power by Jarosław Kaczyński goes hand in hand with his goal of achieving hegemony of the collectivist “Christian nationalist” value system, while he himself is the head of a party but not a patronal network. Thus, although the liberal value system built on the autonomy of the individual is viewed as an enemy, Kaczyński has not built an adopted political family that would constitute a collusion of market and political spheres, oligarchs or systematic wealth accumulation. In contrast, a patronal autocracy rests on the patronalization of the political and market spheres by an adopted po-litical family, achieving popo-litical monopoly and resultantly becoming the base of the single-pyramid patronal network in the country. In a patronal autocracy, the ideal typical stubborn structures prevail to the fullest: the state is patrimonialized and turned into the business venture of the adopted political family, managed through informal and personal ties in general and the instruments of public authority in particular. Close to this category, among others, are Vladimir Putin’s Russia since 2003 and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary since 2010, where both heads of the executive power are also the chief patrons of their respec-tive single-pyramid networks.¹⁰⁹

The two subtypes of Kornaian dictatorship are exemplified today by (1) North Korea, which is extremely close to the ideal type of communist dictatorship, characterized by a total merger of the spheres of social action via the formal institutions of one-party dictatorship and monopoly of state property, and (2) China, which provides the

para-109 For a systemic comparison of the cases of Poland and Hungary, see Magyar, “Parallel System Narratives.”

66 • 1. Stubborn Structures

digmatic case for the ideal type of market-exploiting dictatorship.¹¹⁰ The latter type keeps the dictatorial setting of political institutions, manifesting in all ten features of Kornaian dictatorship, but at the same time it opens up its markets and tolerates a substantial pri-vate sector for political purposes [à 5.6.2]. Needless to say, the single-party public and capitalist private sectors are strange bedfellows and affect each other, resulting in peculiar ways of functioning. On the one hand, the party state is no longer totalitarian and features

“plurality of decision-makers, organizations, and interest groups that are regularly involved in political decision-making,” while it still remains authoritarian with a legal ban on oppo-sition activities.¹¹¹ On the other hand, the private sector develops into a hybrid of free en-terprise and bureaucratic coordination, with informal patronal networks prevailing within and outside the ranks of the one-party system.¹¹² Indeed, market-exploiting dictatorships can be seen as mature successors of the pre-regime change reform models of socialism, where private ownership was legally recognized by the communist states to a certain extent.

The conceptual space spanned by the six ideal type regimes is depicted on Figure 1.6.

In this triangular framework, the three polar types are liberal democracy, patronal autoc-racy, and communist dictatorship, whereas the three further types halve the axes (sides) the polar types extend, in much the same way as autocracy does in Kornai’s understanding between democracy and dictatorship.

Figure 1.6. A triangular conceptual space of regimes.

110 We are indebted to János Boris who coined this term. Also, mainstream literature classifies dictatorships as “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” (see Table I.1 [à Introduction]) but “communist” and “market-exploiting” are better suited to our above-stated purposes.

111 Heilmann, “3.8. Between Fragmented Authoritarianism and a Re-Concentration of Power,” 191. Cf.

Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes.

112 For an analysis of informal networks in China, see Zhu, “Corruption Networks in China: An Institutional Analysis.”

Conservative autocracy

Patronal autocracy Patronal democracy

Liberal democracy Communist dictatorship

Market-exploiting dictatorship

1.6. Beyond Hybridology: A Triangular Conceptual Space of Regimes • 67 The triangular conceptual space lays the foundation for the rest of the book. The

way we circumscribed the six ideal types above should be understood only as preliminary definitions, the completion of which requires an explanation of the machinery of these systems as well as a proper vocabulary. Chapters 2–6 are devoted to this, elaborating on the six regime types’ ideal typical components and spanning homologous conceptual spaces.

Indeed, we will show this visually in Chapter 7, where we give the actual definitions of the six ideal type regimes with the help of various patterns of the triangular space. In the end, the set of categories shall provide tools for the comparative analysis of post-communist phenomena, which result—directly or indirectly—from the stubborn structures presented in this chapter.

2. State

2.1. Guide to the Chapter

This chapter deals with comparative conceptualization of the state. It will unfold along the lines of Table 2.1, which contains much of the concepts that will be introduced, sorted according to the three polar types from the six ideal type regimes of the triangular con-ceptual space.

Table: 2.1. The state in the three polar type regimes (with the topics of the chapters’ parts).

Liberal democracy Patronal autocracy Communist dictatorship

Im Dokument POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES (Seite 90-99)