Patchwork stability as an analytical category: rethinking political stability in hybrid regimes

Contemporary political systems increasingly operate under conditions of institutional fragmentation, contested legitimacy and recurring crisis without necessarily experiencing systemic collapse. Research on hybrid regimes, autocratization and authoritarian resilience shows that many political orders do not move linearly toward either democratic consolidation or full authoritarian control, but reproduce themselves through ambiguous and internally inconsistent institutional arrangements. This article conceptualizes patchwork stability as an analytical category for rethinking political stability in hybrid regimes. It argues that stability in such regimes should not be understood as the absence of crisis, institutional coherence, or a temporary stage between democracy and authoritarianism. Rather, it may be understood as a configurational mode of political order reproduction based on the adaptive recombination of democratic and authoritarian, formal and informal, stabilizing and destabilizing mechanisms. Patchwork stability captures the capacity of hybrid regimes to maintain continuity through fragmented, selectively functional and normatively inconsistent arrangements. Drawing on research on hybrid regimes, complex adaptive systems, resilience theory and institutional recombination, the article advances three arguments: first, hybrid regimes may endure without achieving democratic consolidation or full authoritarian control; second, crisis and institutional incoherence may become integral to regime reproduction; and third, political stability may emerge through adaptive fragmentation rather than normative or institutional coherence. The concept is proposed as a heuristic framework for future comparative research on hybrid regimes, autocratization, authoritarian resilience and governance under permanent uncertainty.