№ 1 - 2002
Merkel B., Croissant A.
Formal and Informal Institutions in Defective Democracies (1)

In the article originally published: «Politische Vierteljahresschrift», 2000, Bd. 41, No.1, the authors set themselves the aim to fill in «blank spaces» in the study of the recent decades’ democratic transformations and to propose a theoretical concept that could help systematically discern new regimes from liberal constitutionally legal democracies. Accepting liberal democracy as the key concept, the authors single out defective democracy as a democratic regime subvariety which in its turn may be further subdivided into three types: excluding democracy, enclave democracy, and non-liberal one. The first part of the article, presented in this issue, contains detailed description of non-liberal democracy. Definitive indications of this type of defective democracy, as the authors demonstrate, are infringement of the principles of legal state, partial elimination of checks and balances, and restriction of civil rights and liberties.