ABSTRACT
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a political regime was accompanied by a newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a descriptive language. This means that the social science concepts that had been developed for the analysis of Western-type polities were applied to the various phenomena in the newly liberated countries. Scholars started to describe these polities as some forms of “democracy” with certain kinds of “governments,” “parties,” “politicians,” “checks and balances” and so on. Indeed, such categories are intertwined and form a special narrative context, a framework of Western-type democracies where the categories have their particular characteristics and their relative place and connections to the other categories of the framework. Therefore, the use of this language of liberal democracies implicitly assumes the structure and logic of Western-type polities, that is, that the regimes the language is used for do share the essential features, the pattern of elements and internal dynamics, of liberal democracies.
