Diverging Party Outcomes in Hybrid Regimes: The Cases of Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro
Diverging Party Outcomes in Hybrid Regimes: The Cases of Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro

Summary/Abstract: In countries that have undergone democratic transition from hybrid regimes in the last two decades, regime collapse was, as a rule, causally linked with turnover in power. Nonetheless, a number of states that have democratized during this period saw the end of hybrid regime without experiencing such political change. Put differently, whereas most of the parties that had been ruling in hybrid regimes lost their power when these regimes ceased to exist, some of them remained politically dominant notwithstanding democratic changes. And while different developmental trajectories of hybrid regimes in the post-Cold War period are thoroughly studied, the diverging faiths of their ruling parties have largely been neglected. By focusing on the hybrid regimes that existed in the 1990s in Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro, this paper puts forward a potential explanation of such political dynamics. It argues that the structure of power in these regimes was the key factor determining whether an incumbent party would stay in power or not. It thereby makes a distinction between regimes whose power is ‘personalized’, i.e. structured around a charismatic leader (as were the former two), and those in which it is ‘institutionalized‘, that is derived from a party organization (as was the latter). Due to this structural difference, it contends, the Croatian and Serbian incumbent parties lost power as the regimes collapsed, whereas the Montenegrin ruling party stayed in power despite democratic change. In addition, it posits that the levels of stability of three regimes were considerably different due to the same reason.

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