The Structure of Power in Hybrid Regimes: Institutionalised vs. Personalised

The end of the Cold War has given strong impetus to the process of global proliferation of so-called hybrid political regimes (Karl, 1995) that combine elements of democratic and authoritarian governance. In an attempt to explain new political practices these regimes ‘brought’, interested scholars have stressed the importance of re-thinking key concepts found in the literature on political systems so as to allow for typologies that can serve as a solid basis for cross-national regime comparisons (Wigell, 2008). And although some progress has been made with that respect, hybrid regimes’ conceptual ‘mapping’ is still well underway. Instead of adding to the extensive list of alternative conceptual forms, this paper seeks to contribute to the process by bringing new categorical differences into the existing analytical framework. Focusing on competitive authoritarian regimes (Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010) in Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro, it makes a distinction between regimes whose power is ''personalized'', i.e. structured around the charismatic leader (as it was the case with the former two), and those in which it is ''institutionalized'', that is derived from the party organization (as was the latter). Thus far, organizational power of similar regimes was mostly explained as either “high’, or ‘medium’, or ‘weak’. In view of that, this paper ventures beyond these vague descriptive notions in order to bring about an innovative strategy for conceptual framing of hybrid regimes. By differentiating between them on the basis of character of their internal power structure, it offers new criteria for constructing typologies in the field.