An illiberal democracy describes a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it does not constitute an open society. The rulers of an illiberal democracy may ignore or bypass constitutional limits on their power. They also tend to ignore the will of the minority which is what makes the democracy illiberal. Elections in an illiberal democracy are often manipulated or rigged, being used to legitimize and consolidate the incumbent rather than to choose the country's leaders and policies. Some theorists say that illiberal democracy is a fundamentally undemocratic hybrid regime and therefore prefer terms such as electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, or soft authoritarianism. Origin and description The term and concept of illiberal democracy derive from the 1995-book Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia by Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, and David Martin Jones. Challenging Francis Fukuyamaʼs end-of-history thesis that political history was culminating in the global rule of capitalist liberal democracy, the book countered that Pacific Asia was not converging on liberal democracy but had instead taken an illiberal turn. Political philosopher Daniel A. Bell contributed a chapter on Confucianism as offering an alternative, illiberal approach to democracy. The term illiberal democracy was then used and popularized by Fareed Zakaria in a regularly cited 1997 article in the journal Foreign Affairs. According to Zakaria, illiberal democracies are increasing around the world and are increasingly limiting the freedoms of the people they represent. Zakaria points out that in the West, electoral democracy and civil liberties (of speech, religion, etc.) go hand in hand. But around the world, the two concepts are coming apart. He says that democracy without constitutional liberalism is producing centralized regimes, the erosion of liberty, ethnic competition, conflict, and war. Recent scholarship has addressed why elections, institutions commonly associated with liberalism and freedom, have led to such negative outcomes in illiberal democracies. Hybrid regimes are political systems in which the mechanism for determining access to state office combines both democratic and autocratic practices. In hybrid regimes, freedoms exist and the opposition is allowed to legally compete in elections, but the system of checks and balances becomes inoperative. Regime type is important for illiberal democracies. This is because illiberal democracies can rise from both consolidated liberal democracies and authoritarian states. Zakaria initially wrote