Abstract
Contrary to widely held expectations, the third wave of democratization has brought about notonly democracy but also the emergence of many regimes of whichtraditional democratic theorycannot make sense. The overwhelmingly dichotomous, teleological, and minimalist approachesfail to adequately describe political regimes in the grey zone between outright autocracy andfull-fledged democracy. In our essay, we discuss the theoretical approaches that aim to graspwhat has been increasingly called hybrid regimes, namely political regimes that combineautoritharian and democratic elements. We point to the theoretical and empirical limitationsof these efforts and argue that the concept of hybrid regimes is still inextricably linked with theconcept of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, even if the existing approaches to hybrid regimessuffer 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 politicalregimes.