To provide protection against harm caused by defective, unsafe products and to promote product safety, the law of product liability has developed as a specialized area of the law of delict (tort). The vexing question is, who should bear such liability? This contribution interrogates the notorious EU development risk defence, which exonerates manufacturers that meet certain stringent requirements for undiscoverable development risks in products that consequently inflict harm on consumers. In particular, it considers the election by South Africa, which recently adopted a “strict” product liability regime with the introduction of the Consumer Protection Act 2008, not to adopt such a defence. The purpose of this contribution is to consider the nature and scope of the development risk defence as contained in article 7(e) of the European Union (EU) Product Liability Directive and to determine whether it was prudent for South Africa to steer clear of incorporating a similar defence in its new statutory product liability regime.

Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders in empowering judges, the article seeks both to displace uncritical assumptions and arguments about courts as the nucleus of legal mobilisation in Pakistan, and to highlight the crucial role of political parties in the restoration of the judiciary against the backdrop of disintegrating lawyer-judge coalitions. Given Pakistan’s political context of a ‘hybrid regime’, the article reflects on the unsuitability of the ‘legal complex’ theory of ‘political liberalism’ for analysing and understanding the Movement, and locates it instead in the literature on legal mobilisation in authoritarian regimes.

Countermobilization has been a common strategy for autocrats to counteract the threat of opposition. Although the use of countermobilization has drawn scholarly attention, research on the mechanisms that enable countermobilization remains limited. This article underscores the role of political institutions in allowing autocrats to carry out countermobilization through incentivizing elites to serve as a bridge between the state and the masses. Focusing on the case of Hong Kong, where pro-government countermobilization is rising along with pro-democracy challenges against the hybrid regime, the article argues that countermobilization is enabled because societal elites are incentivized through political institutions to organize the masses and develop mobilization capacity through grassroots organizations. Using original elite biographical data and organizational data, the article shows that elites with more ties with grassroots organizations are more likely to remain in office in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The findings offer an institutionalist explanation of how authoritarian rulers enact countermobilization by leveraging elite intermediaries and their grassroots networks. In this light, political institutions can serve as a conduit for the state to extend social control.

Our aim in this article is to show the stance on solidarity present in a hybrid regime. Taking Hungary as an example, we give individual-level explanations for attitudes towards solidarity and inclusion/exclusion in times when populist parties are in power. By creating typical solidarity groups, we explain who belongs to different solidarity clusters and why, what political orientations can be linked to solidarity groups and whether people's attitudes reflect the values/solidarity conceptions propagated by the Orbán government. With this, we point to the social and political polarization of Hungarian society. We found that the appreciated, satisfied and politically trustful far-right exclusive groups – independent of their social status – make up not only the majority of society but also the crucial system-justifying basis of the Orbán regime. However, in an ethnically rather homogeneous society foreigners could be seen as cultural and economic threats to the decisive majority, including a significant part of the inclusive groups.

This study provides a new dataset on the ideological positions of political parties in Hong Kong, which is a hybrid regime with electoral elements. Using this dataset, the study challenges the non-ideological view of party competition in Hong Kong by identifying an ideological dimension to the elections held between 1998 and 2016. It is shown that parties do position themselves along an identifiable left–right spectrum, with shifts that can be meaningfully interpreted, and that the aggregate ideology of the electorate appears to be linked to the level of economic growth. The ideological dimension provides a novel perspective on local politics that looks beyond the dominant pro-democracy versus pro-Beijing divide while also shedding light on the recent changes underlying the latter. This study provides valuable objective data for analyzing political competition dynamics and contributes to the comparative literature by incorporating Hong Kong into the framework of the manifesto coding project.

This paper examines the diffusion of activism in post-colonial Hong Kong through the lens of the political regime and eventful analysis. It first reveals the institutional foundations of the hybrid regime that allowed the creation of a nascent movement society. It then explains how the historic 1 July rally in 2003 and a series of critical events since 2006 have led to a shift in scale and the public staging of street politics. A time-series analysis and onsite survey further capture the dynamics that spawned the collective recognition of grievances and reduced participation costs, leading to the Umbrella Movement. While the spontaneous, voluntary and decentralized organizational structure sustained protest momentum, the regime has adopted hybrid strategies to counter-mobilize bottom-up activism. The result is widening contention between the state and civil society and within civil society, or the coexistence of regime instability and regime longevity, a trend that is increasingly common in hybrid regimes encountering mass protests.

In recent years there has been growing interest and a related literature on hybrid regimes. Is there a good definition of such an institutional arrangement? Are there actually sets of stabilized, political institutions that can be labelled in this way? Is it possible that within the widespread process of democracy diffusion these are only ‘transitional’ regimes and the most suitable distinction is still the old one, suggested by Linz and traditionally accepted, between democracy and authoritarianism? This article addresses and responds to these questions by pinpointing the pertinent analytic dimensions, starting with definitions of ‘regime’, ‘authoritarianism’, and ‘democracy’; by defining what a ‘hybrid regime’ is; by trying to answer the key question posed in the title; by disentangling the cases of proper hybrid regimes from the cases of transitional phases; and by proposing a typology of hybrid regimes. Some of the main findings and conclusions refer to the lack of institutions capable of performing their functions as well as the key elements for achieving possible changes towards democracy.