Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hybrid regime

Hybrid regime

Hybrid regime (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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I propose merging hybrid regime into anocracy. I asked for reasons against merging in June 2024 and the only response in two years was Viriditas expressing concern that the hybrid regime article needs a lot of reworking and appears to be the result of an import from ruwiki. ZFT seems to be wondering what the difference is too (if there is one).

Research papers that compare the terms include (1) May 2026 The Political U: New Evidence on the Economic Costs of Hybrid Regimes, Diamond (2002) refers to these as "hybrid" regimes, Epstein et al. (2006) and Fearon (2011) call them as "partial democracies," Bogaards (2009) and Croissant and Merkel (2019) name them "defective democracies," and Zakaria (1997) labels them "illiberal democracies." ... Polity classifies political regimes along a continuous scale, within which intermediate regimes—labeled as "anocracies"—can be identified; (2) Min Ji Kim, UC San Diego, Jan 2024, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, presumably an expert in a different field viewing the field from the outside, considers the two terms equivalent: it was anocracies, or hybrid regimes, ... what is the impact of anocracies or hybrid regimes. (3) Schmid 2024 presents a strong case that there are lots of nuances in distinguishing different sorts of in-between-democracy-and-autocracy regimes that he calls "pseudodemocratic autocracies" (PDAs) for the particular purpose of having a neutral term for his paper, and that these nuances are significant for studying correlations or possible causal relations of regime type with human rights, ethnic inequality, state capacity, democratic backsliding, cabinet instability, or power-sharing. Schmid's analysis is not an argument against a merge, but it's an argument that the people doing the merge will have to invest some careful work in integrating, copyediting and checking the text against the sources in both the current anocracy and hybrid regime articles. Plain copy/pasting won't work.

Overall, it seems that there are a bunch of terms for an in-between-regime that make sense to group together in the merged article, but the reader should be informed that political scientists vary on which term to prefer and whether or not the different terms for in-between-regimes have well defined and/or possibly distinct meanings within the overall in-between-regime broad category. Boud (talk) 20:02, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

• Support merger of Anocracy into Hybrid regime (updated) As proposer. Arguments above. Boud (talk) 20:07, 29 June 2026 (UTC) (updated per discussions below Boud (talk) 11:32, 1 July 2026 (UTC))
• I haven't done enough of a dive to have a fully formed opinion here yet, but based at least on the excerpts quoted here, it seems more prudent to merge anocracy into Hybrid regime rather than the other way around, based on the reasoning that Campos 2026 uses that term in its title while reviewing literature that uses a range of related terms, Kim 2024 asserts that they're interchangeable, and Schmid 2024 uses other terms. At a glance, it also appears that many (most?) of the sources at Anocracy do not actually use that term (and the article's Etymology section notes that the term itself is an incorrect derivation from Greek; that's not in itself an airtight argument against it in the face of actual use by relevant RS, but it may be a motivation for RS to avoid it, and possibly a motivation for us to break what otherwise may be a COMMONNAME wash in favor of another term). _signed, Rosguill ^talk 20:18, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

  Just to clarify that I don't have any arguments for which direction the merger should go; I guessed that anocracy was the better quality article, but I didn't really check. It looks like you've checked the anocracy sources, which I didn't. Personally, I find having a single word (anocracy) rather than a pair of words (hybrid regime) convenient, but that's an invalid argument for the preferred article name or merger direction. Boud (talk) 20:39, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

  I would agree with Rosguill. Hybrid regime, as much as we dislike the term, has currency in modern literature in the last 20 years. I haven't seen anocracy used in recent discussions. There may be a case for keeping the articles separate, I don't know. Viriditas (talk) 20:46, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

  Anocracy is 64% by Kha2714 with a grand total of ... 12 edits, and final edit in 2014. Not too bad for a Wiki Education Project participant, but that explains why it needs a lot of work. Doesn't seem to have any copyvios. This also circumstantially argues for anocracy to be merged into hybrid regime (possibly split off later if it's sufficiently distinguished). Boud (talk) 20:52, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

  Why do you dislike the term? ZFT (talk) 19:29, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

• I oppose this merger.
  hybrid regime is the umbrella concept and anocracy is part of it/another way to describe it, alongside with electoral authoritarianism, electoral autocracy, illiberal democracy, defective democracy, competitive authoritarianism, etc.
  some of these terms have clear authors and definitions, while others are more vague. All of them, on average, represent the same thing, unless you emphasize the specifics. I think, describing the specifics requires separate articles.
  Or someone must put there enormous amount of work and make one article (about the subject) with others (about the terms) as redirection to it sections. ·Carn·!? 21:36, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

  Maybe some of the others that are just alternative terms for the same thing should be merged too. However, for clarity in this discussion, I suggest that arguments for or against merging the other related articles could probably be only listed briefly here and left to other merger proposals once this one is closed. A multimerger is a bit more complicated (in terms of properly putting alerts in all the right places) than a two-article merger. Do you have an argument specifically why "anocracy" has a distinct meaning from "hybrid regime"? (I found a nuance, see below, that doesn't seem to justify a separate article.) Boud (talk) 06:46, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

• Note: this discussion has been included in the list of Politics-related AfD discussions. Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 21:36, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Opposed Hybrid regime is an overview topic where Anocracy is a specific type of hybrid regime (as explained in the note in the lead of the article that explains there's a multitude of terms for Hydra regimes). We should have a separate article for all the typologies (it's too bad we don't yet)..... as we should not make it hard for people to find specific typologies of hybrid regimes WP: Does merging help?. The basics on typology can be reviewed here..... To put it simply we seem to have different terms for different parts of the world as scholars coin their own terms for specifically defined types of hybrid regimes..... In South America they use a multitude of terms (as seen in the hybrid regime article). Our end goal should be to have separate articles for all terms coined that have had academic exposure so we can expand all the nuances of each concept and provide references for our readers for verification and further research. I don't think we should be emerging any of these instead we should be expanding them and allowing standalone articles to allow easy searching and growth.Moxy🍁 01:27, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Can you see any difference between an anocracy and a generic hybrid regime apart from that stated by Schmid 2024? Schmid only defines an anocracy as a regime category capturing [pseudodemocratic autocracies] ... corresponds to ... in Polity IV to anocracies, i.e. it's the particular name that Polity data series chooses for hybrid regimes, except for cases like Somalia: The outlier is Polity, whose anocracy category includes cases where the regime cannot be easily identified, such as during interregnum, interruption, or transition. I don't understand how a regime type that cannot be easily identified, and whose name is used by just one (notable) group of authors, is worth a separate article. WP:NOTDICT. Boud (talk) 06:46, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

An anocracy is not a brief transitional situation, but a type of regime that tends to be long living. To put the situation bluntly what is best for our readers to try to find some abstract concepts hidden in some overview article or have a article dedicated to the term so people can research and hopefully expand the article? Our goal should be to allow content editors to expand articles for our readers..... Not a behind the scenes bureaucracy that consolidates everything.Moxy🍁 11:18, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Do you have a source that defines an anocracy as a generally long-living hybrid regime? Boud (talk) 18:15, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

(It seems a bit odd to suggest that there's a distinction based on how long-lived these states are, given that basically every state that is considered for these categories was formed in the mid-20th century at the earliest; none of these states are long-lived in the grand scheme of things. But of course, if RS differ I would defer to them. Reading through examples at anocracy though, they currently include...Nigeria since 2007, Somalia since 2013, Uganda since the 1990s, Zimbabwe since the 1980s, Burma since 2021, Cambodia since 1993, Thailand since the 80s/90s, as well as Mexico until 1990, Taiwan 1949-1980s, Ghana 1990-2006, which seems to suggest that I and most other participants of this discussion are longer lived than most anocracies. Meanwhile, Hybrid regime lists Singapore, Morocco and Jordan, who have had essentially uninterrupted rule by their current regimes since the 1950s) _signed, Rosguill ^talk 21:44, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Scholars also debate if these regimes are in transition or are inherently a stable political system.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}

Sources

Ekman, Joakim (2009). "Political Participation and Regime Stability: A Framework for Analyzing Hybrid Regimes". International Political Science Review. 30 (1): 7–31. doi:10.1177/0192512108097054. ISSN 0192-5121. S2CID 145077481. Baker, A. (2021). Shaping the Developing World: The West, the South, and the Natural World. SAGE. p. 202. ISBN 978-1-0718-0709-5. Archived from the original on 2023-04-23. Retrieved 2023-04-23. "Why Parties and Elections in Dictatorships?". How Dictatorships Work. Cambridge University Press. 2018. pp. 129–153. doi:10.1017/9781316336182.006. ISBN 9781316336182. Riaz, Ali (2019). "What is a Hybrid Regime?". Voting in a Hybrid Regime. Politics of South Asia. Singapore: Springer. pp. 9–19. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-7956-7_2. ISBN 978-981-13-7955-0. ISSN 2523-8345. S2CID 198088445. Schmotz, Alexander (2019-02-13). "Hybrid Regimes". The Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation. Oxford University Press. pp. 521–525. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198829911.003.0053. ISBN 978-0-19-882991-1. Morlino, Leonardo (2011-11-01). "Are There Hybrid Regimes?". Changes for DemocracyActors, Structures, Processes. Oxford University Press. pp. 48–69. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199572533.003.0004. ISBN 978-0-19-957253-3. Подлесный, Д. В. (2016). Политология: Учебное пособие [Political Science: Textbook] (in Russian). Kharkiv: ХГУ НУА. pp. 62–65/164. Archived from the original on 2023-04-22. Retrieved 2019-08-13. Schulmann, Ekaterina (15 August 2014). "Царство политической имитации" [The kingdom of political imitation]. Ведомости. Archived from the original on 2019-07-30. Retrieved 2019-08-13.

Moxy🍁 11:26, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

some more basics Moxy🍁 17:00, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

WP:RSCHATGPT: that is not "more basics", that is AI slop, as stated on the home page: meta name="description" content="The AI research tool for Model UN, debate, History Day, AP, and IB — position papers, cases, and research with a real source on every claim." Boud (talk) 18:47, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Will rewrite article after this to make it more understandable to those not familiar with the topic. Moxy🍁 20:06, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

• Either merge "Anocracy" into "Hybrid regime" (not the other way around), or keep them separate but clarify the differences in meaning; currently, the way the terms are defined in the articles, they seem nearly (if not entirely) synonymous. Additionally, I think that "semi-democracy" should be redirected to "hybrid regime", and the relevant information moved from "anocracy" (the current target) to "hybrid regime". ZFT (talk) 21:51, 30 June 2026 (UTC)
• Question: How does "Mixed government" fit into this mess? That is to say, do hybrid regimes and/or anocracies count as mixed governments, or vice versa; and if so, should "Mixed government" be merged into "Anocracy" or "Hybrid regime", or vice versa; or should the articles be kept separate but edited to clarify the differences in meaning between the terms? ZFT (talk) 05:13, 3 July 2026 (UTC)

  Excellent question. I don't think it would be useful to delay the closure of this specific merge proposal to convert it into a multi-merge, so I started a section Talk:Mixed government#Relation to hybrid regimes where people can add arguments, and convert it into a merge proposal if needed. Boud (talk) 08:32, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

  We are headed down the wrong path as merging all this would not benefit our readers. Let's get more involved that know the basic...will ask a few other to join us. One has to ask Wikipedia:Does merging help?Moxy🍁 14:50, 4 July 2026 (UTC)