In this blog, I have written several posts on concepts and shown how good concepts work and how bad concepts don’t, often creating such monstrosities as that strange animal, the cat-dog. In this post, I engage once again with bad concepts, now focusing on “hybrid regimes”, a term used by the Economist Intelligence Unit in a way that only creates confusion.
The world of politics is complex, everyone knows that. To make sense of such complexity, we must begin from having solid concepts, and use them as the basic units of our thinking. A concept consists of three parts: a term (or word, or label) that corresponds to some specific meaning that we have in mind, which in turn points to clearly identifiable empirical referents, that is, the phenomena that we observe out there and want to understand and explain.
Continue reading ““Hybrid regimes” is a bad concept”
