Can illiberal democracy be considered a mature democracy?

Question

According to this article illiberal democracies are becoming fashionable these days:

PRINCETON - Nearly two decades ago, the political commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote a prophetic article called “The Rise of the Illiberal Democracy,” in which he worried about the rise of popular autocrats with little regard for the rule of law and civil liberties. Governments may be elected in free and fair elections, he wrote, and yet routinely violate their citizens’ basic rights.

Since Zakaria’s piece, illiberal democracies have become more the norm than the exception.

According to Larry Diamond (via Wikipedia) a democracy consists of four key elements:

(a) A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; (b) The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; (c) Protection of the human rights of all citizens, and (d) A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.

On the other hand, an illiberal democracy:

is 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.

So, according to Larry Diamond, an illiberal democracy is not a democracy (or at least this is my conclusion).

Question: can illiberal democratic regimes be considered democratic regimes or they, in fact, should be considered authoritarian regimes with a tendency towards dictatorship? Or shortly put, isn't "illiberal democratic" just a fancy concept for a nondemocratic regime?

To narrow down the question, I am thinking about Hungary and its Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán.

Answer 1

Based on the Given Definitions

To restate the definition from the question, something is a democracy if (and only if) it meets these four criteria:

• (a) A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections;
• (b) The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life;
• (c) Protection of the human rights of all citizens, and
• (d) A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.

We are asked whether an illiberal democracy is really a democracy, or something else. So what is an illiberal democracy? Given by the question,

is 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.

It should be clear that this does not necessarily violate any of the four conditions to be a democracy. However, there at least two facets that are somewhat interesting:

This system is a democracy, so long as those with "real power" are not preventing it from being so. Criteria (a) could be violated by our hypothetical political leaders, but will not necessarily do so. This gets us back to age-old questions about the virtues of our leaders. The same goes for criterion (d) - without the citizenry knowing whether laws are being applied fairly to leaders, we don't know whether the rule of law in fact exists. However, there is no criteria in our definition that citizens know anything significant about their leaders.

Second, the idea of an illiberal democracy requires that there be a "lack of civil liberties". All four of our criteria can be met without many civil liberties, but any hypothetical example would have to satisfy what civil liberties exist in order to be interesting. For example, even without freedom of the press or free association we could have a "free and fair" election - if there is no media. However, if the media is being manipulated to prefer one candidate, party or viewpoint than the election is definitely not "fair".

Short answer: Yes, an illiberal democracy can be a democracy. However, it is also possible for an illiberal democracy to not be a democracy.