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.
Practically speaking, concepts work in the following way: Beginning from the term (the designator of the concept in mind), you must give it some unambiguous meaning, and from there, through a process called operationalization (usually involving some kind of measuring or scoring system), you have to apply the intended meaning to concrete empirical cases. It can be said that we have a good concept when it expresses clear meaning and helps to seize the object intended without ambiguity. In contrast, concepts are bad when they are based on confusing terms, when the relation between the term and the meaning it conveys is ambiguous, or when the relation between the meaning and the referents is vague. Bad concepts fail to establish boundaries for separating the object that needs to be explained from other objects that may look similar but not the same. Eventually, bad concepts lead to a bad understanding of the world. Below, there are depictions of a good concept construction and the disaster that follows when concepts are bad.
To make sense of democracies around the world, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has built an index, called the Democracy Index, based on the distinction between four types of regimes respectively termed “full democracies,” “flawed democracies,” “hybrid regimes,” and “authoritarian regimes.” Each of these terms is then given a specific meaning, allegedly including all the characteristics that are necessary and sufficient to capture each type of regime, and finally, based on several indicators (or other operationalizations), the countries around the world are placed within one of the four regime types. Those regime types are defined (see Democracy Index 2021, p.68) as follows:
- Full democracies are countries in which not only basic political freedoms and civil liberties are respected, but which also tend to be underpinned by a political culture conducive to the flourishing of democracy.
- Flawed democracies are countries that also have free and fair elections and, even if there are problems, basic civil liberties are respected.
- Hybrid regimes are nations in which elections have substantial irregularities that often prevent them from being both free and fair.
- Authoritarian regimes are states in which political pluralism is absent or heavily circumscribed. Many countries in this category are outright dictatorships.
Presuming that we can be certain about the first (i.e., advanced liberal democracies) and the fourth (i.e., dictatorships) of the foregoing regime types, there are still three fatal problems with EIU’s indexing: First, the terms “flawed democracy” and “hybrid regime” at least are ambiguous; second, the meaning attributed to those terms is confusing; third, since the terms are conceptually unbounded, the number of referents that correspond to these terms is open and, indeed, unlimited. And so, as we are not able to seize the object of analysis, the initial conceptualization, as well as the index based on it, prove faulty.
To show those problems in a less technical way, I recently asked (without disclosing the original source) my sample of Twitter followers to try matching the exact meaning of hybrid regimes as perceived by the EIU to one of the following terms: authoritarian states, hybrid regimes, flawed democracies, and populist states. Note in passing that the first three terms are those used by the EIU index itself while the fourth term, populism/populist states, is obviously a false analogy.
There were quite a few surprises. The first of them is the confusion that the EIU’s meaning of “hybrid regimes” creates since people link it to several different terms—which, to be sure, are not synonyms. A second surprise is that most respondents think of the declared meaning to be associated with authoritarian nondemocratic states rather than with democratic ones. The problem here is that the EIU has a different meaning for “authoritarian regimes.” Finally, a substantial number of respondents thought that the EIU’s definition of hybrid regimes fits best their understanding of populism. Which, after all, is not surprising if one considers that “populism” has become in our days such a cliché:-)
Selecting and allocating clear terms to our concepts is of paramount importance for two major reasons. First, the stability of general language depends on such clarity. But language is not only a means of expression; it also determines the ways in which we conceive the phenomena we are interested in exploring in the real world of politics. Here enters the second reason of why our terms should be clear. For, unclear terms lead to fuzzy concepts with ambiguous meaning and unable to make sense of the cases that belong to them in real-life politics. Eventually, this surely leads to misunderstanding reality, fallacious argumentation, bad policies, and political mismanagement.
