This chapter first presents an ideal type of a hybrid regime. This account sees a hybrid regime as a regime that presents itself as a functioning democracy, but in which the incumbent has disproportionate control over the rules of the game. The chapter then identifies points of tension between a hybrid regime’s constitution and the constitution of a good state. It shows that three constitutional features tend to be found in a hybrid regime: rivaling constitutional ideologies of democracy and guardianship; a trifurcated dual state legal order; and two levels of constitutional battle. Along the way, the chapter suggests how these features might impact a constitutional court in a hybrid regime.

This chapter examines what judges can do inside the courtroom to promote democratic norms amidst authoritarian pressure. It proposes a two-step adjudicative framework – that of ‘Sustainable Democratic Adjudication’ – that allows judges to systematically incorporate both constitutional legal principles and judicial strategies. Under step one, judges need to form an initial view on what the law requires under the democracy-orienting approach proposed in Chapter Four. During this step, they must apply a presumption of ‘institutional blindfold’, ignoring the possible influence of prudential considerations. This book terms the tentative conclusion reached at this stage the ‘formal legal position’. The second step involves judges lifting the blindfold to check whether, and if so how, the formal legal position should be supplemented with or adjusted by strategic considerations. These are questions determined by the level of risk incurred by maintaining the formal legal position. The chapter also examines the strategies in relation to outcome, reasoning, language and timing that judges can deploy during the adjudicative process.

The chapter presents three models of what courts how courts operate in hybrid regimes. The first two are what this book calls the Pessimistic model and the Optimistic model. They represent two different bodies of literature and two contrasting views of constitutional courts in hybrid regimes. Under the Pessimistic model, a court can do very little to resist an authoritarian, let alone promote democratic norms. On the other hand, the Optimistic model views a constitutional court as the guardian of liberal democratic norms, possessing the capacity to bring democratic change to a hybrid regime. This chapter argues that while each model captures distinct elements and raises important issues regarding constitutional courts in hybrid regimes, each has gone too far. Drawing on the lessons learnt from the analyses of these two models, the chapter presents a third – and what it argues to be a more attractive – model, namely, the Realistic model, under which the constitutional court can play a meaningful, if limited, role within the hybrid regime.

This chapter first situates the book’s argument in the context of two global phenomena: the proliferation of hybrid regimes and the diffusion of court-centric constitutionalism. It then shows why a normative look at constitutional courts in hybrid regimes is an important, but overlooked topic in the literature. Next, the operating assumptions of the book are specified, and basic terms are defined, including constitutional courts and democracy. The chapter concludes by offering a roadmap of the book.

This chapter summarizes the arguments of the book. It highlights that for judges who are democratically committed, the book has offered the theories and tools to help them build institutional resilience and contribute to democratic values. These tools cannot guarantee these democractic outcomes, as there is a limit as to what judges have control over in authoritarian environments. Nevertheless, constitutional courts are often heavily involved in the shaping of constitutional norms and structures. By pushing beyond the boundaries set by conventional conceptions of the judicial role, this book hopes to have instilled optimism in politically challenging environments and demonstrate how judges who are committed to the democratic cause can improve the chances of survival and success of constitutional courts.

This chapter examines what judges can do to protect the judiciary and make their judgments more effective using off-bench tools and by relying on their social networks. It discusses four sets of tools. The first is relation-building. This chapter examines how alliances can be forged through two kinds of off-bench engagement - public relations and judicial diplomacy – and with eight potential allies of a committed court: (1) lawyers, (2) legal academics, (3) the media, (4) civil servants, (5) international organizations, (6) businesses, (7) the general public, and (8) fellow judges. The chapter then proceeds to explore a second set of tools: that on establishing diplomatic connections with hostile groups. Drawing on the concept of backchanneling, the chapter theorizes the potential dangers and benefits of clandestine engagement with hostile parties. The third and fourth tools to be discussed are protest and mobilization. The chapter ends with reflections on the option of resignation and argues that resigning should only be considered as a last resort.

This chapter argues that courts should play a role in protecting and promoting democratic values in a hybrid regime and lays out how that can be done. The chapter opens with the argument that the counter-majoritarian objection is singificantly less relevant in a hybrid regime context, contending that its reduced relevance permits the constitutional court greater latitude in its support of democratic ideals in a hybrid regime. Five different democracy-enhancing roles of a constitutional court are then proposed, alongside tools that would help facilitate the realization of these roles. The five democratic roles include: (1) the referee role, (2) the interpretative role, (3) the participatory role, (4) the quasi-representative role, and (5) the educative role. The chapter then addresses how competency concerns impact the democratic roles proposed. It argues that the democratic roles are justifiable because there is a lack of better alternatives in a hybrid regime. Courts are a second-best solution: they may not normally be the best institution to tackle certain political failures, but the inadequacies of the political process in a hybrid regime offer reasons for a constitutional court to act.

Disaggregation has been an underappreciated tool for the formation and utilization of concepts. This chapter argues that disaggregating multidimensional concepts can be useful in four ways. It can (1) resolve dilemmas of “awkward fit,” where some empirical cases seem to fit in the categories established by a concept at best awkwardly, at worst inappropriately; (2) address the challenge of “middle cases”; (3) strengthen measurement validity; and (4) avoid a problem of tautology. The use of disaggregation will be examined with respect to important and complex concepts such as corporatism and democracy.

This chapter describes how the book contributes to the understanding of lawmaking under authoritarianism by specifying the conditions under which legislatures perform their lawmaking function within authoritarian regimes, showing the mechanisms through which legislatures operate and influence the contents of policies, and helping to elucidate the ways in which legislatures may be consequential both to policymaking and politics, thus extending the scope conditions of power-sharing accounts of lawmaking to any type of autocracy. It also suggests how the theory and methods employed may be used to study the role of business and bureacracies in authoritarian regimes, and to recast the approaches to federalism and policymaking under dictatorship, and to the role of legislature in regime transitions.

This chapter presents a theoretical model of the conditions under which natural resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes pursue or eschew the liberalization of domestic economic regulations in the twenty-first century. I term this the rent-conditional reform theory. This model focuses on three salient groups: political elites who devise and implement policy, economic elites who enjoy non-competitive privileges, and the non-elite citizenry who may or may not participate in private entrepreneurship. This model illustrates the demands and constraints both economic elites and the citizenry impose upon political elites amid the pursuit of economic liberalization.

The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

Political technology is defined, not as Russians define it as a synonym for politics, but as the 'supply-side engineering of the political system for partisan advantage'. Such manipulation is now common across many types of regimes: deteriorating democracies, so-called smart authoritarianisms and hybrid regimes, but particularly the latter. Manipulation techniques spread through various types of globalisation. Political manipulation can no longer be orientalised: corruption, judicial capture, propaganda and artificial structures to spread it are also increasingly prevalent in the West.