Methodology of FCG-Analysis of Political Regime Trends

The article raises the problem of matching classical methods of typologizing political regimes to the typical tasks of modern domestic customers of regional studies. The dominance of the developmentalist paradigm and teleological approaches in modern transitology focuses on assessing the regime’s compliance with democratic standards, thereby actualizing the need for more universal and neutral methodological tools. Considering a political regime as a set of regime trends at a given time provides the necessary methodological flexibility, especially in situations with hybrid regimes. Moreover, considering regime trends as a combination of a certain archetype of the political elite and practices of working with political power makes it possible to explain regime logic and characteristic strategic imperatives, which, in turn, will have a significant impact on the nature of decisions made. Thus, by comparing the characteristics of the decisions taken with the imperatives of regime logic, we will be able to determine the strength of regime trends in the political system under consideration. To analyze political decisions, we adapted the economic concept of “Fast-Cheap-Good” (FCG) to the specifics of the political system, after which this method was tested on the practical material of France in 2015.