SECOND CRITICAL REVIEW ESSAY

A Critical Review of Larry Diamond, 2002, “Elections Without Democracy: Thinking

About Hybrid Regimes”, Journal of Democracy, Volume 13, Number 2, April 2002.

According to the journal, the author tries to make it clear that many countries have adopted
the form of democracy with little of its substance, which makes classifying regimes both
challenging and significant. Larry Diamond insists that after the "third wave" of democratization,
there still exists controversial debates over what constitutes democracy. Many different viewpoints
of scholars and questions are raised in the article to ensure that it really matters. Categorizing
regimes requires both the assessment of previous elections and the ability of elites. And by listing
a number of nations, the author can easily transfer his notion of the problem. Throughout history,
characteristics of hybrid regimes are pointed out. For example, Mexico, Senegal, Zimbabwe,
Malaysia, and Thailand fit the category that Levitsky and Way call "competitive authoritarian".
Mexico represents a hegemonic party system, using coercion, patronage, media control, and other
means to deny formally legal opposition parties. During the third wave, both the number and
proportion of democracies in the world have increased dramatically with the support of a data table.
Also, he mentions that there is a strong relationship between the country size and regime type.
Elections are free when candidates can experience much freedom to campaign and voters are under
no public orientation. The distinction between electoral democracy and electoral authoritarianism
depends on the freedom, fairness, inclusiveness, and meaningfulness of elections. Many other
factors constitute fair elections like being administered by a neutral authority and the protection of
secrecy of the ballot. Regimes are considered democratic if they have free, fair, and open elections
for all the principal positions of political power. Competitive authoritarian regimes are more
difficult to categorise than hegemonic electoral authoritarian ones. As democracies differ among
themselves in significant ways and degrees, so do contemporary authoritarian regimes. We must
understand the different, and in some respects new, types of authoritarian rule. Classificatory
schemes like the ones in these articles impose an uneasy order on an untidy empirical world.

In summary, the journal gives us thorough insights into the problem of classifying regimes.
The author does his work in a logical way by dividing it into six parts, each following the previous
to support his idea. That he arranges the article by combining historical elements with current
issues helps readers feel a flow of events and then have conclusions themselves by taking
differences into consideration. The most outstanding point in the journal is that Larry Diamond
uses a number of tables, which makes his explanation less theoretic. Supporting ideas with data is
much more persuasive. However, from my perspective, the author can deepen into the factors
leading to the issue, not necessarily all parts of the world. When we can look directly into the
sources, then confusion and debates may be solved one day.