The subject of the study is the analytical category of “political regime consolidation” in its contemporary understanding, together with the interrelation of the three principal approaches to its development – the institutional, the processualist, and the actor-centred – in their connection with the conceptual apparatus of the hybrid regimes literature. The article examines the conceptual content of the category of “political regime” in its relation to the categories of “political system” (D. Easton, G. Almond) and “legitimate domination” (M. Weber); it distinguishes the close but non-identical concepts of “political transformation”, “political transit”, “regime change”, and “consolidation of the regime”. Particular attention is paid to the Linz–Stepan redaction of the category of consolidation as “the only game in town” and to the conception of the five “arenas of consolidation”. The article analyses processualist transitology (G. O’Donnell, P. Schmitter; V. Bunce, M. McFaul; V.Ya. Gelman), the institutional approach (D. North, A. Przeworski; G.V. Golosov), the actor-centred direction (A.V. Ponedelkov, A.M. Starostin; S.P. Potseluev), and the literature on hybrid regimes (A. Schedler, L. Diamond, S. Levitsky and L. Way, F. Zakaria). The methodology employs the systemic, institutional, and comparative methods of political science, supplemented by techniques of conceptual analysis in the tradition of analytical political philosophy. The source-critical strategy involves work with primary sources: key propositions are cited directly with reference to specific pages. The scientific novelty of the work consists in three interrelated results. First, a three-level analytical framework of political regime consolidation is proposed, in which the institutional, processualist, and actor-centred approaches are synthesised as mutually complementary explanatory layers rather than as competing research programmes. Second, the conceptual apparatus of the hybrid regimes literature – electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, illiberal democracy, hybrid regimes as a distinct class – is integrated into this framework as an operationalising layer of typological description, not as an alternative typology. Third, post-communist-specific variables not reducible to the standard toolkit of 1980s–1990s transitology are identified within the indicators. It is concluded that the category of consolidation retains its analytical force on the condition of being maintained as a multidimensional, content-neutral concept; that the task of contemporary political diagnostics is not a choice among the three approaches, but their synthesis at the level of a multi-level system of operational indicators; and that bridging the gap between the typology of hybrid regimes and multi-level consolidation diagnostics is one of the priority tasks of comparative political science.
Lesnichenko et al. (Sun,) studied this question.