Informal Institutions in Authoritarian Regimes: Conceptual Issues and Empirical Evidence from Asian Cases

The third wave of democratization did not lead to an extinction of non-democratic regimes in Asia. Lumped together, authoritarian and hybrid regimes still the constitute the majority of political regimes in the region. The particular focus of this paper is on the role that informal politics and informal institutions play in terms of structuring regime dynamics in Asia’s autocracies. It discusses at the conceptual level how informal politics has been understood in the relevant literature and how informal institutions - understood as rules and organisations - interact with formal institutions by forming complementary, accommodating, substitutive or competing relationships. Case studies deal with factional politics in the Chinese Communist Party and regime dynamics in Central Asia.