№ 2 - 2002
Merkel B., Croissant A.
Formal and Informal Institutions in Defective Democracies (II)

It is the reasons of the appearance of non-liberal democracies that are discussed in this second part of the article (for its first part see Polis, 2002, No.1). In the authors’ opinion, the formation of regimes of such a type is in many respects related to the supplanting of formal institutions of the constitutionally legal state which are substituted for by informal rules and institutions. Deformalization of political procedures and decision-making rules is caused, in its turn, by the impact of: (a) the pre-democratic heritage of practices; (b) a complex of economic and political problems going back to authoritarianism; (c) the constellation – at the level of formal legal (constitutional) institutions, political culture and the system of interests mediation – of factors forming the “non-liberal code” which, to a significant extent, determines the respective societies’ political development. In conclusion, the authors formulate three conceivable scenarios of eventual evolution of non-liberal democracies – regress, stableness and progress – and analyze, respectively, conditions of, and prospects for the realization of each of them.