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Abstract:
The hybrid regimes comprise the majority of contemporary political constellations. However, the hybrid regime paradigm does not account for the diversity among these regimes. Drawing on the case of post-Soviet Azerbaijan, the present study establishes a new conceptual framework-the sultanistic semiauthoritarian model that amalgamates two theories: semiauthoritarianism and sultanism. This article argues that sultanistic semiauthoritarianism can be considered as one of the most serviceable conceptual frameworks to deal with the case of post-Soviet Azerbaijan's political regime.
Key words: Azerbaijan, democratization, hybrid regime, semiauthoritarianism, sultanistic, transition
There have always been ambiguous political regimes: neither fully democratic nor clear-cut authoritarian. These political systems can persistently resist moving toward either democracy or authoritarianism. They live as if they were frozen in a certain temporal sequence of political change. Contemporary political science has a distinct subfield of democratic transitology, which claims to explain different trajectories of political change. However, even the most advanced fivefold categorization of modern political regime types' developed by such distinguished scholars of the transition school as Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) has a serious discrepancy when it comes to uncertain political systems. As a partial solution of the problem of incomplete transitions, they have introduced a new category of sultanism to be used in reference to extremely patrimonial regimes that coalesce around a highly personalistic and dynastic-prone ruler who exercises power at his own unrestricted discretion.
In addition, Houchang E. Chehabi and Juan J. Linz devoted a special volume to sultanistic regimes, which was published in 1998. In Sultanistic Regimes, they predicted that sultanism's reemergence should not be ruled out. However, they could not expect their prophecy to be so promptly self-fulfilling. Five years later (October 2003), Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev succeeded in transferring presidential power to his son, Ilham Aliyev. Dynasticism was the first sign that the perception of Azerbaijan transitioning to democracy was at least overly optimistic. Some analysts (Roeder 1994; Mamed-zadeh 2001), took another extreme. They proposed to locate Azerbaijan on the continuum of authoritarian regimes. However, some peculiarities of Azerbaijani regime give us a solid ground to claim that it does not fit the pure authoritarian model.2
In the light of these events, how can we treat post-Soviet Azerbaijan? Which conceptual framework should we think of? Currently, these...