Abstract

The article addresses one of the most discussed topic in the field of democratization, attracting scholars' attention on their origins, functioning and stability: the so called «hybrid regimes». Considered as a political regime characterized by a mixture of institutional features which are typical of both a democracy and an autocracy, the article discusses the main conceptions and synonyms that paved the way to the proliferation and vagueness of terms, undermining the possibility to better analyze such phenomenon. In particular it raises the question whether hybrid regimes can be classified either as a new third type or a sub-type of democratic or authoritarian political system. There is no doubt that the disagreement at the conceptual level has influenced the empirical analysis and determined a conceptual stretching which needs to be re-formulated in order to better understand their real identity and further institutional development, avoiding «a competition to see who can come up with the next famous concept» and recovering what democratization studies provided for the accumulation of knowledge.