Elena Baracani

While transitions to electoral democracy have largely been a success story, this has not been the case for the consolidation of democracy, leading to the instauration and consolidation of a growing number of hybrid regimes. This edited volume addresses the main reasons of this phenomenon looking at the empirical reality of European post-Soviet states - Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. It is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to the definition of hybrid regimes and to the presentation of some main hypotheses on the paths and reasons that have led these countries to the instauration of hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The second and third parts of the volume are dedicated to the role played respectively by external actors and domestic dynamics in favouring a certain regime change. It is suggested to develop the research question - that is why some countries have not transformed their political regimes into democracies and have remained authoritarian regimes or have become hybrid ones? - into two more specific questions: (1) what are those domestic and external actors and factors (DEAFs) that, in each country and in a specific temporal period, prevent a successful democratization of the political regime? And (2) what happens when some of these DEAFs interact with each other? It is shown that most important interactions, in terms of reinforcing or weakening democratization, are those combining the domestic and external levels of analysis.ical Science from the University of Florence in 2006, and she is currently Research Assistant and Lecturer in European Union Foreign Policy at the University of Florence. In 2008 she won a post-doc research grant in the framework of the 'European Foreign and Security Policy Studies' programme funded by the Compagnia di San Paolo, and a European Union Institute for Security Studies Fellowship. She published in 2008 a monograph in Italian on the EU and democratization in Turkey, and she is publishing a book in Italian on the EU and the transformation of ethnic conflicts. She also published many book chapters (some of these have been published by Routledge, Palgrave, Brookings Institution Press, Nomos Verlag, Ashgate, and EPAP), peer-reviewed articles, and working papers on EU external relations with acceding and neighbouring countries. She has experience in teaching B.A. and MA courses of Political Science at both Italian (University of Florence and University for Foreigners of Perugia) and American Universities (Rutgers University, Kent State University, and California State University). In addition, she is the tutor for the PhD Programme in Political Science at the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, and the coordinator of the Italian Society for the Study of the Diffusion of Democracy (SSDD).