Classifying Political Regimes:

A Six-Fold Measure of Democracies and Dictatorships

Jos Antonio Cheibub, Yale University
Jennifer Gandhi, Emory University
October 2004

ABSTRACT
The centrality of political regimes for the research agenda of political scientists is undeniable.
Considerable effort has been dedicated to empirically testing propositions about the conditions
under which political regimes emerge and survive, and their consequences for a broad set of
outcomes, notably their impact in promoting economic development and international peace.
Several measures of political regimes have appeared in the recent years, which differ significantly
in theoretical scope, interpretability, and repeatability. In this paper we present a six-fold
classification of political regimes which originates in a dichotomous distinction between
democracies and dictatorships. This classification covers 1999 countries between 1946 and 2002,
and is based on the institution that is capable of removing the government from office. We
compare our classification with existing alternatives, and show that the choice of measure is not
inconsequential. For this reason, decisions about which measure to employ in analysis should be
chosen in terms of whether they serve to address important research questions, can be interpreted
meaningfully, and are reproducible.

INTRODUCTION
A perusal of the past few years of the main political science publications demonstrates the
renewed centrality of political regimes to the disciplines research agenda. Considerable effort has
been dedicated to empirically testing propositions about the conditions under which political
regimes emerge and survive, and their consequences for a broad set of outcomes, but notably their
impact in promoting economic development and international peace. Part of this effort was
possible due to the proliferation of measures of political regimes covering a large number of
countries over a relatively long period of time.
In the wake of such development, a debate has emerged over the most appropriate way to
measure political regimes. Disagreement exists over what exactly should be measured and how it
should be measured: What is the notion of democracy that underlies existing measures? Should a
measure be continuous or categorical? If categorical, should it be dichotomous or polychotomous?
Should the input into the measures be exclusively observable events or should subjective judgment
be allowed in generating them? Important as these debates are, they have not been of much
consequence since most scholars seem to believe that, in the end, measures of democracy are
interchangeable. They correlate with each other and, in fact, tend to generate similar results when
used against one another in robustness checks of empirical findings (e.g., Fearon and Laitin
2003:85).
We disagree with this view. We believe that existing measures of political regimes are
significantly different in terms of both their theoretical grounding and operationalization and, for
this reason, should not be treated as interchangeable. In our view, we should take the differences
across measures more seriously and evaluate them in terms of whether they (1) serve to address
important research questions, (2) can be interpreted meaningfully, and (3) are reproducible.

The objective of this paper is to present a six-fold classification of political regimes which
distinguishes three types of democracy (parliamentary, mixed and presidential) and three types of
dictatorship (civilian, military and monarchic). Democracies and dictatorships, we believe, are
qualitatively different and hence are not easily classified along one single dimension. Although at
one level we use the same factor in distinguishing different types of democracies and dictatorships
the institution that is capable of removing the government the symmetry of this factor across
the two basic kinds of regime is limited. In democracies we focus exclusively on the legislature
and its prerogative to remove the government from office: exclusive in parliamentary regimes,
shared with the president in mixed regimes, and absent in presidential regimes. In dictatorships, in
turn, we consider the different types of institutions that can remove the government as the defining
trait of the regime: kin and family structures in monarchies, the armed forces in military regimes,
and the party in civilian regimes. Although the six-fold classification of regimes that we introduce
here represents only one among several possible ways to classify democracies and dictatorships, it
is valuable because it can be used to address empirically several of the issues currently on the
agenda of political scientists, is theoretically grounded and, most importantly, is reproducible.
Since the six-fold measure of political regimes we present here is conditioned on a
dichotomous classification of regimes as democracies and dictatorships, we start by summarizing
the rules that generate such a classification (section 1). We then proceed to address each of the
debates that have emerged around the classification of political regimes, arguing that the charges
commonly made against a dichotomous, minimalist measure of democracy are not valid. We argue
against the substantive view of democracy that underlies the alternatives to our dichotomous
measure (section 2), show that these alternatives are based on vague and arbitrary operational rules
(section 3), and that since their distributions are bimodal, they do not add any more information

than what is contained in the classification of regimes into democracies and dictatorships (section
4). For these reasons, existing measures of democracy are not interchangeable and the choice of
measure should be guided by its theoretical and empirical underpinnings. We then present the
reasons and the rules for classifying democracies as parliamentary, mixed and presidential (section
5), and dictatorships as monarchic, military and civilian (section 6). The appendix contains the list
of countries with their regimes and the dates they existed.
1. DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS
The six-fold regime classification we present in this paper is rooted on the dichotomous
classification of regimes as democracy and dictatorship introduced in Alvarez et al (1996) and
Przeworski et al (2000), extended to cover more countries (58 more) over a longer period of time
(from 1946 to 2002). Given that there has not been any change in the rules for classifying these
regimes, here we simply summarize these rules and compare the current with the previous
classification. The changes that did occur were entirely due to the fact that new information about
specific cases was made available.
Democracies are regimes in which governmental offices are filled as a consequence of
contested elections. For a regime to be democratic, both the chief executive office and the
legislative body must be filled by elections.1 Contestation occurs when there exists an opposition
that has some chance of winning office as a consequence of elections. This implies that elections
are ex ante uncertain and repeatable, and that outcomes are ex post irreversible. Operationally, a
regime was classified as a democracy if it met the requirements stipulated in all of the following
1

That not all offices need to be filled by elections is uncontroversial. Collier and Adcock (1999:549), in turn,

believe that having only one of those offices filled by elections should be sufficient to qualify a regime as at least
partially democratic. Yet, is a system in which the president is elected in contested elections but the laws are made
by a legislative body composed of her appointees at all democratic?

four rules: (1) the chief executive must have been elected; (2) the legislature must have been
elected; (3) there has been at least two parties or lists competing in the elections; and (4) an
alternation in power under identical electoral rules must have taken place.
The implementation of the first two rules is straightforward since it is simple to observe
whether the relevant offices are filled as a result of elections. The third rule, although slightly more
complex, is also straightforward: for a contested election to take place, voters must have at least
two alternatives to choose from. Hence, elections in which a single party competes, or in which
voters are presented with a single list, do not qualify as contested elections.2 The implementation
of the last rule is more complicated since it requires that we make one assumption and one decision
about what kind of error we are willing to accept. It does not, however, require any subjective
judgment on the part of the analyst and hence does not compromise the classifications
reproducibility.
An alternation in power takes place when the individual occupying the chief executive
office is replaced through elections that were organized under the same rules as the ones that
brought him or her to office. For obvious reasons, the alternation only becomes relevant in the
cases where the first three rules apply. The implementation of this rule, however, is complicated by
the fact that, given the occurrence of elections in which two or more parties compete, it is difficult
to distinguish cases where incumbents never lose power because they are popular, from those
where incumbents only hold elections because they know they will not lose them. Since there is
nothing in any conception of democracy that precludes the emergence of a highly popular

Not all elections are contested; of the 1457 legislative elections and 489 presidential elections that occurred in the

1946-96 period, 728 and 268, respectively, were under regimes that are here classified as dictatorships. Data on
elections from Golder (2004).

incumbent who is time and again returned to office by very pleased voters, the first case should be
coded as a democracy. And since incumbents who are ready to call off elections at the moment
they anticipate a defeat violate the ex ante uncertainty and repeatability conditions for contested
elections, the second case should be coded as a dictatorship. Yet, these two cases are
observationally equivalent.
Part of the problem can be addressed if we assume that current actions are revealing of
what incumbents would have done at different points in time. Consider, for examples, the cases of
Malaysia and Japan. Between independence in 1957 and 1969 there were three multiparty
elections in Malaysia. The incumbent party won an absolute majority in the first two, but not in the
third one. As a result, the government declared a state of emergency, closed parliament, issued a
harsh internal-security law and rewrote the constitution in such a way that it never lost an election
after parliament was reopened and elections resumed in 1971. We code Malaysia as a dictatorship
under the assumption that the incumbents actions in 1969-71 demonstrated their predisposition of
holding elections only to the extent in which they were assured of winning. In Japan, the Liberal
Democratic Party was in office continually until 1993, when, after an electoral defeat, it yielded
power to the opposition. We code Japan as a democracy under the assumption that the LDP would
have yielded power had it lost elections prior to 1993.
Yet, even if assumptions are made, in some cases we cannot know what type of incumbent
is in office. The best example is, of course, Botswana, where seven multi-party elections were held
since independence in 1966 under conditions that most analysts consider to be free and fair (no
constraints on the opposition, little visible repression, no apparent fraud), and the incumbent has
won each of them by a very high margin of victory. Had the Botswana Democratic Party lost one
of these elections and allowed a different party to form a government, or had it closed parliament

and changed the electoral rules, we would be able to identify the regime either as a democracy or a
dictatorship. As it is, we simply do not know and, until one of these events happens, we need to
accept that we are not capable of coding Botswana with the rules we now have. We can exclude all
cases such as Botswana from the data set, we can call them democracies, or we can call them
dictatorships. Whatever we do, there will be some systematic error due to the fact that we cannot
tell the cases apart. But we can, at least, control for this error.3
One of the consequences of this rule is that the uncertainty inherent in cases such as
Botswana may be resolved as history unfolds. In the original classification (Przeworski et al.
2000), the four rules unambiguously classified 92% of the country-years between 1950 and 1990.
In the current extension, the proportion is exactly the same: there are 8% of country-years between
1946 and 2002 that we classify as dictatorships on the grounds that they fail the alternation rule
only. Some of the cases, however, have changed, either because new countries have emerged and
events were not sufficient to allow us to determine their regime type (e.g., Georgia, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan) or because history provided the information we needed and we had to revise our
original coding (e.g., Mexico, Senegal).
The issue that arises with countries such as Mexico under Vicente Fox and Senegal under
Abdoulay Wade, where the opposition won after a long period of incumbent victory in multiparty
elections, is to determine when exactly the transition occurred. That the new government should be
classified as a democracy according to our rules is not problematic. But should the government
that allowed the alternation to take place be also classified as a democracy? If yes, what about the
3

We code cases such as Botswana as a dictatorship, but identify them through a variable called Type II, so that

users of our classification may either recode them as democracies or remove them from the analysis. Note that these
are not intermediate cases; we simply cannot tell whether they are a democracy or a dictatorship given what we
can know or what can be known about the country.

government prior to that one, the previous one, and so on? Specifically, does the fact that Fox took
office in Mexico in 2000 require that we recode the regime as a democracy all the way back to the
1920s, when the PRI first came to office?
We address this issue by focusing on the rules under which the incumbent was elected. If
the opposition wins under rules that are identical to the ones that led to the victory of the
incumbent, then we consider the incumbent democratic: the years under that persons rule meet all
four rules for classifying a regime as a democracy. This is done with all previous governments up
to the point where the electoral rules were changed. The rules that matter are the broad electoral
rules who votes, how votes are counted, and who counts the votes. Thus, in the case of Mexico,
we date the transition to democracy to 2000, when Fox, the candidate of one of the opposition
parties, was sworn into the presidency. The electoral rules were changed under the Zedillo
presidency (1994-2000) when, in 1996, an accord between the ruling PRI and the two opposition
parties (PAN and PRD) ended the PRIs control of the Federal Electoral Institute. Similarly, we
date transition to democracy in Senegal to 2000, when the incumbent Abdou Diouf, of the Socialist
Party, lost to Abdoulaye Wade, of the Democratic Party. Dioufs last victory had been in the 1993
election, prior to the creation of the independent National Observatory of Elections in 1997.
With these rules, thus, we classify democracies and dictatorships in 199 countries between 1946
and 2002, for a total of 7,880 country-years: 4,607 (58.5%) dictatorships and 3,373 (41.5%)
democracies.
In addition to this classification (henceforth referred to as DD) there are two other

measures of political regimes that are widely used:4 the Freedom House (FH) measure of political
and civil liberties, which covers all countries of the world between 1973 and 2002 and the Polity
IV (POLITY) measure of political regime characteristics, which covers all countries between 1800
and 2000. In FH each country is given an independent score from the highest (1) to the lowest (7)
level of political and civil liberty. In POLITY, there are two conceptually independent scales of
autocracy and democracy, each ranging from 0 to 10, which frequently are then subtracted to
generate a political regime measure that ranges from -10 (least democratic) to 10 (most
democratic).
Although these measures are similar in the sense that they cover a large number of
countries for a relatively large number of years, they are different in at least three important ways:
(1) the conception of democracy that underlies each of them; (2) the nature of the data used to
assess political regimes; and (3) the type of measurement they perform. We turn now to a
discussion of each of these aspects as a way to assess the value of these three measures.
2. CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY
Measures of political regimes differ as to whether they adopt a strictly procedural,
minimalist view of democracy as opposed to a more substantive one. In the first case, democracy
depends exclusively on the presence of certain institutions, with no reference to the kinds of
outcomes that are generated by their operation. Thus, underlying DD is the notion that democracy
is a regime in which those who govern are selected through contested elections and, once
identified, the occurrence of contested elections is necessary and sufficient to characterize a regime

Several other measures have been proposed but they are not widely used, mostly because they are available for

only a few years (Bollen 1980 and Coppedge & Reinicke 1991), are not sufficiently defined (Arat 1991 and
Gasiorowski 1996), or include inappropriate indicators (Vanhanen 2000).

as democratic.
In substantive conceptions of democracy, institutions are seen as necessary but not
sufficient to characterize a political regime. Although it may be that no democracy exists that does
not have contested elections, not all regimes that are based on contested elections may be called
democratic. What matters is that, through these elections, something else happens: the public good
is achieved, citizen preferences are represented, governments become accountable, citizen
participation in political life is maximized, economic equality is enhanced, rationality is
implemented, economic conditions improve, and so on. Those who use FH, therefore, believe that
the measure of freedom it offers can be used to indicate democracy. Polity IV is variously
used to indicate democratic regimes conceived in terms of accountability, fairness, freedom or
some other attribute.
Thus, one point of debate with respect to measures of political regimes is whether a
minimalist conception of democracy, such as the one underlying DD, is sufficient to characterize
political regimes. There are many researchers who believe it is not. For example, for Diamond
(1999) such a view of democracy merely identifies electoral democracy, which is distinct and
inferior to liberal democracy. For Mainwaring, Brinks and Prez-Lin (2001), it is subminimal
since it leaves out participation, guarantees of civil and political liberties, the governments ability
to really govern, and civilian control of the military. For ODonnell (1995), it fails to distinguish
between delegative and liberal democracies. For Levitsky and Way (2002), it fails to identify a
distinct regime type, competitive authoritarianism. For Coppedge (2002:36), it fails to handle
emerging questions about the quality of democracy. Finally, for Weeden (2004:4) a measure of
political regime based on a minimalist conception of democracy is limited since it tends to
obscure concerns of central importance to substantive representation, such as how democratic

rulers should act once elected, and what their duties and obligations as rulers are, or should be.
A measure of democracy based on a minimalist conception, however, is compatible with
most of the theoretical issues that animate empirical research on political regimes. For instance,
democracies are considered to undermine economic development because governments may
become hostages of voters short term interests (DeSchwinitz 1964, ODonnell 1973); they are less
likely to go to war because of the domestic costs (paid at election time) of such a decision (Fearon
1994, Schultz 1999); and, they manage to avoid catastrophes such as famines because governments
cannot avoid challenges they will face when elections are held (Sen 2000). In addition,
macroeconomic performance is thought to suffer because of governments attempts to manipulate
the economy for electoral purposes (Nordhaus 1975, Tufte 1978); or, alternatively, long term
economic performance will be better because they must satisfy the voters who will be able to
remove them from office in periodic elections (Paldan 1991, Powell and Whitten 1993, Wilkin et
al. 1997). Market-oriented reforms, in turn, will not be attempted or implemented consistently
because governments fear voters reaction to them (Przeworski 1991, Haggard and Kaufman 1995)
or, on the contrary, they will be attempted and implemented consistently because governments will
be rewarded in future elections (Hellman 1998). In addition, income inequality will be reduced as
voters will choose governments in elections that will correct through the political system the
allocation generated by the economic market (Meltzer and Richard 1981, Przeworski 1990). In all
of these areas of research, and in many more, the mechanism that links political regimes to
outcomes is the occurrence of contested elections.
Substantive conceptions of democracy, on the other hand, generate measures that are not
amenable to the empirical investigation of at least some of these issues. If democracy is defined as
the regime where rulers are accountable to the ruled, then the issue of whether governments under

10

democracy do indeed act in voters best interests becomes redundant. If besides political equality
democracy also requires economic equality, the finding that income distribution is more egalitarian
under democracy only corroborates what is true by definition. Moreover, including more
dimensions along which to classify political regimes makes it harder to specify the causal
mechanisms that link regime and the outcomes of interest. When a study employing FH reports a
positive effect of democracy on economic growth we may reasonably wonder what is it among the
over 20 dimensions that enter into it that is driving the observed relationship. Similarly, how
should we substantively interpret the hundreds of possible response patterns that the components
of the POLITY measure generate?
Expanding the notion of democracy to include more than contested elections may also blur
the boundaries between political regimes and other political entities, and lead to the inclusion of
attributes that are, as Munck and Verkuilen (2002:54) put it, aspects of the state as opposed to a
regime type. Civilian control of the military, national autonomy with respect to the international
system, bureaucratic responsiveness to executive and legislative authorities, are attributes that vary
across political systems, irrespective of the rules they follow to choose who makes decisions for
the country.
Finally, substantive notions of democracy also tend, albeit marginally, to undermine the
legitimacy of regimes where governments, although chosen on the basis of contested elections, are
not representative of new cultural, social and economic relations. We may hear echoes of the old
lefts disdain for the mere formalism of bourgeois democracy when we hear that some
democracies, invariably the new ones in developing countries, are not worthy of the label since
all that they do is to choose governments by contested elections. The only difference is that the
capitalist democracies that the old left found wanting with respect to some ideal form of

11

democracy the absolute equality that would be brought about by communism are now taken to
be the model existing regimes in developing countries should strive to achieve. On these grounds,
even India, in spite of over 50 years of periodic contested elections with alternation in power
between political parties representing very distinctive social forces, is a case of a democracy that
needs to be qualified (Zakaria 1997, Diamond 2002).
A minimalist definition of democracy is compatible with a variety of specific ways in
which social and political life is organized. It does not attach any weight to the way governments
are formed, political parties compete, candidates selected, voters vote, and votes counted; to the
way justice is organized and dispensed, to how much or in what ways the state intervenes in the
economy or to whether private property is upheld. It recognizes that all governments are
constrained in their actions, be it by those who hold guns or by those who own capital, domestic or
international. All that a minimalist definition of democracy requires is that citizens be given
periodically the opportunity to choose their leaders in electoral contests; that they be presented
with more than one alternative; and that those who win become, indeed, the countrys leaders.
Disagreement about conceptions of democracy probably cannot and certainly does not need
to be resolved at the philosophical level. Measures are nothing but ways to make specific concepts
operational and hence should not be evaluated in terms of the intrinsic values of the concept they
are meant to operationalize. What matters is that the concept be clearly formulated, the measure
clearly related to it, and that its use does not preclude the study of the theoretical questions we care
about. On these points, DD is very clear.
3. WHAT KIND OF DATA?
At the limit, all measures are subjective in the sense that people have different ways to look
at the world and may choose to use different rules for generating a measure. The issue is whether

12

existing measures are reproducible, that is, whether knowledge of the rules and the relevant facts is
sufficient to unambiguously lead different people to produce identical readings on specific cases.
We take as axiomatic that this is something of value in any measure.5 Yet, neither FH nor POLITY
is reproducible in this sense.
Part of the reason they are not has to do with the fact that the rules on which they are based
are insufficiently defined. FH requires answer to the following questions, with no clear attempt to
define the relevant terms or qualifiers: Are there fair electoral laws, equal campaigning
opportunities, fair polling, and honest tabulation of ballots? Are voters able to endow their
representatives with real power? Do minorities have reasonable self-determination, selfgovernment, autonomy, or participation through informal consensus in the decision-making
process? Are the people free from domination by the military, foreign powers, totalitarian parties,
religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group? Are there free and
independent media? Are there free trade unions and other professional organizations, and is there
effective collective bargaining? Is there personal autonomy? Is there equality of opportunity?
Similarly, the Polity IV democracy scale requires one to decide whether constraints on the chief
executive in any given country are close to parity, whether the executive faces substantial
limitations, or whether the constraints are located in one of two possible intermediate categories.

To our knowledge, Mainwaring, Brinks and Prez-Lin (2001) are the only ones to explicitly defend the use of

subjective judgments in classifying political regimes. They state that their classification of Latin American countries
is predicated on the belief that this enterprise demands some subjective judgments about the nature of political
regimes. By subjective we do not mean arbitrary, but rather informed judgment based on knowledge of the cases
and guided by explicit coding rules (p.37). Later on they say that regimes should be classified according to
observables, but social scientists must make judgments about whether an infringement is sufficiently serious as to
regard a regime as less than democratic (p.42).

13

Another reason these measures are not reproducible has to do with the difficulty in obtaining the
information they require. Whereas DD requires one to know whether an election occurred, how
many parties competed, who won and who took office, FH requires knowledge of that plus of how
the electoral campaign was conducted, the content of party platforms and campaign financing laws
and practices, the operation of the justice system, the structure of labor representation, collective
bargaining, and more. POLITY requires less, since it focuses on the processes leading to the
selection of the executive and the participation of politically active members of the political
system. Yet, a good deal must be known about how these processes take place in order for one to
be able to adjudicate a specific case among the several values of each of the component
dimensions. Having been involved with trying to discover merely the basic facts about elections in
the different countries of the world since 1946, we can attest that the data required by FH and
POLITY are hard, if not impossible, to obtain; and that, as a consequence, much of the coding
must be made on the basis of inferences, extensions, guesses and perhaps even prejudice.
These are, of course, not irremediable problems. Those responsible for generating the
measures may explicitly attempt to define the terms and specify the cases to make them less vague
and subjective.6 Moreover, the amount of information available to researchers has increased
exponentially and there is no reason for us not to believe that, someday, we will know everything
that needs to be known about each of the cases we want to code. Yet, even when rules are clearly
6

POLITY has become increasingly concerned with this and, in an attempt to make the coding process less

subjective, has provided lengthy descriptions of specific cases in order to illustrate what goes into each of them. It is
interesting, however, that these are ostensible definitions of each of the cases, rather than ex ante rules for coding
regimes. POLITY also releases to the public the component variables of the final measure thus allowing researchers
to aggregate them in different ways and to recode cases one may find dubious. FH releases neither the rules it uses
to make specific decisions nor the components that go into its measure.

14

defined and facts are known, the possibility of systematic error is not eliminated remember that,
as discussed in section 1, about 8% of the country-years in DD cannot be unambiguously coded as
democracy or dictatorships because history has not yet provided the information we need to make
a decision. Thus, the lack of clear rules and the unavailability of necessary information just
compound the amount of error that may be going into each of these measures. And since the
measures are irreproducible across different coders, we cannot even assess the amount of
systematic error that goes into each of them.
4. TYPE OF MEASUREMENT
Whereas DD classifies political regimes as democracy or dictatorship, FH and POLITY
offer polychotomous classifications. Among the debates that have engaged those who study
political regimes empirically, this is probably the one that has generated the highest level of
controversy, with the majority of views coming down against the use of a dichotomous regime
classification.
The main argument against the dichotomous classification of political regimes is that it is
limited in terms of the information it conveys. Collier and Adcock (1999:538), for instance, claim
that the use of a dichotomous regime classification is puzzling since it places regime differences
at what is traditionally viewed as the lowest level of measurement. Bollen, having postulated
the inherently continuous nature of the concept of political democracy (1989:612), claims that
we unnecessarily compromise the concept by considering it a dichotomous phenomenon
(1991:9). This, he proceeds, leads to a crude lumping of countries into the same category when in
reality they have very different degrees of political democracy (1991:9).
This criticism is, in part, based on a misunderstanding since it assumes that the
dichotomous nature of DD is simply the product of a decision to measure at that level a

15

phenomenon that is otherwise continuous. But the use of a dichotomous classification of political
regimes is not driven by the desire to simplify the measurement process. It does not imply
imposing a cut-off point of any sort over an underlying, latent distribution of political regimes.7
Rather, it is based on the notion that political regimes can be directly observed and that we can
distinguish two main types, depending on whether or not the government is chosen through
contested elections. Thus, the matter is not whether one should adopt a continuous or a categorical
measure of democracy, observable across all political regimes. The issue is whether there is a
natural zero-point that divides democracies and non-democracies. Even those who, like the present
authors, develop and use categorical measures of democracy will agree that, given some
appropriate yardstick, democratic regimes may differ as to how democratic they are, and that some
measure to assess their degree of democratic-ness may make sense. Note, however, that this refers
to democratic regimes, as opposed to non-democratic regimes. It assumes that some regimes fail
whatever requirement there is for them to be called democratic.
The belief that democracy is an attribute that can and should be measured over the
spectrum of cases leads to assertions that cannot be easily supported, such as that there are positive
levels of democracy in places like Albania under Hoxa, North Korea and Chile under Pinochet.
But even if it is granted that it does not make sense to speak of democracy in these cases, the
argument could still be made that a measure with more categories such as FH and POLITY is to be
preferred since it will convey more information than a measure with only two categories. This,
however, is not necessarily true. The informational content of different measures depends on the

Elkins (2000), for example, assumes that the true distribution of political regimes is continuous. This being the

case, it is only natural that he discovers that more categories will be better than fewer categories at capturing the
true value of democracy.

16

way they are conceptualized and observed, at least as much as it depends on the level of
measurement. Given the degree of subjectivity and vagueness that goes into FH and POLITY, it is
not at all clear what information they are actually conveying. What exactly is being conveyed
when we say that, according to POLITY, the level of democracy in 1965 Singapore was -2, or that
it was -6 in Burma under the military junta?
Moreover, there is a fair degree of arbitrariness in the construction of these measures. In
FH, for instance, coders assign raw points ranging from 0 to 4 for each of the 8 questions in the
political liberties and 14 questions in the civil liberties checklists, for a maximum of 32 and 56
points respectively. Countries are then distributed into one of the seven categories that make up the
final political and civil liberties scales according to the number of raw points they received. For
example, a country with 28-32 raw political rights points is placed in category 1 of the political
rights scale; with 23-27 points, it is placed in category 2; and so on. No reason is ever given for
attributing a maximum of 4 points in each category, rather than 5, 6 or a million; or for why the
lower bound of category 1 is 28 and not 27, 25 or 10 raw points. The aggregation method of each
measures components is also fairly arbitrary. It gives equal weight to each of the components,
with no justification and no consideration of the possibility that the different dimensions may have
different impact on the nature of the regime.8

Gleditsch and Ward (1997) have shown that most of the variation in the overall index is accounted for by changes

in one dimension Chief Executive Constraint. Treier and Jackman (2003) adopt a more adequate aggregation
model on the Polity components and show that there is considerable error in the latent levels of democracy
underlying the Polity scores, (p. 24) and that, because this error is heteroskedastic, ignoring it is likely to lead to
inferential error. Gandhi and Vreeland (2004), in turn, report that the inverted-U relationship between democracy
and risk of civil war, identified by Hegre et al. (2001) on the basis of Politys overall score, only holds for one of its
four components.

17

This degree of arbitrariness is extended to the practice of creating regime types on the
basis of the FH and POLITY measures. Many of the questions that political scientists care about
have to do with being in or out of a given state such as the political regime, and not with the
incremental changes over a gradation. The entire transitions literature is predicated on the notion
that one can identify the point at which a political regime stopped being a dictatorship and became
a democracy. We ask questions about the supply of public goods under different types of
democratic regimes, about the propensity of different types of regimes to go to war, about the
choice of regime political elites make under different conditions, and so on. To study these
questions empirically we need measures that identify these states. Since scale measures or the
categories of the existing multinomial measures do not represent any of the states that are
theoretically identified, researchers are required to collapse regimes into democratic and nondemocratic so that they can then study what brings these states about and the consequences of
being in them. Thus, in their study of the democratic peace, for example, Rousseau et al. (1996)
consider that a democracy is any regime that received a score of 17 or higher in their transformed
POLITY scale.9 Epstein et al. (2003), who argue that partial democracies emerge from their
analysis as the key to understanding democratic transitions (p.21), define them as regimes that
score between 1 and 7 in the POLITY measure (whereas full autocracies are those that score
between -10 and 0 and full democracies those that score between 8 and 10). Starr and Lindborg
(2003) categorize political regimes into democratic, non-democratic, and transitional
according to the Freedom Houses classification of countries as free, non-free, and partially
free. These, in turn, are the countries whose average political and civil liberty scores were,

The Polity scale is normally built so that it will range from -10 to 10; Rousseau et al. (1996) transform it so that its

range is 0 to 20.

18

respectively, between 1 and 2.5, 3 and 5.5, and 5.5 and 7. This practice can hardly be innocuous.
Deciding when a case belongs to one type or another, when it is democratic or not, is entirely
arbitrary, justified not by theory, but by the empirical salience, or perhaps even the convenience, of
specific cut-off points.10
Finally, although FH and POLITY are polychotomous, their distributions are actually
bimodal, with a high concentration of cases in their low and high ends: 56% of the cases are
classified in the three lowest and highest categories of FHs 13-point scale; 73% of the cases have
scores that are 7 and lower or 7 and higher in the 21-point POLITY scale. Thus, in spite of a
larger number of categories, these measures add little if any additional information to a
dichotomous classification of political regimes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the correlation
among the three measures is high: the correlation between POLITY and FH is 0.91; POLITY
predicts correctly 94% of the cases classified as democracies by DD and 95% of those classified as
dictatorships; FH predicts 88% and 95%, respectively. However, once observations at the extremes
of the distribution are excluded, the correlations among existing measures become significantly
weaker: it is 0.75 between POLITY and FH; POLITY predicts 70% of the democracies in DD
and 83% of dictatorships, whereas FH predicts 67% of democracies and 81% of dictatorships.
This fact is not without consequences for empirical research. For example, the inversed-U shaped
relationship between political regimes and civil war identified by Hegre et al. (2001) disappears
when we exclude the cases scoring less than -8 and more than 8 in the Polity measure. The
negative impact of Islam on democracy identified by Fish (2002) survives weakened when the
extremes of the FH measure are trimmed, but not at all when the extremes of the POLITY measure

10

Zinn (2004) reports that studies of the onset of civil war are not robust to the adoption of different cut-off points

of the POLITY measure.

19

are removed from the analysis.

Thus it is the uncontroversial cases that drive the high correlation among different
measures of political regimes and, perhaps, are driving the empirical patterns identified in studies
of political regimes. No measure will produce very different readings for the regimes in, say,
England, Sweden, North Korea or Iraq. The difficulty will appear with cases such as Mexico,
Botswana, Malaysia, Peru, Guatemala, and scores of other countries that populate the middle of
the distribution of existing measures and for which the rules, as stated, do not apply clearly. What
is it that these countries represent in terms of political regimes? What does it mean to be located in
the middle range of the POLITY or FH distributions? Given that once we get to these cases no
consensus seems to exist across measures, the choice of measure must be made on conceptual
grounds.
We thus firmly believe that the use of a dichotomous measure to gauge political regimes
does not necessarily imply over-simplification, a lack of information or any of the pitfalls that are
commonly attributed to it. To the contrary, in our view, such a measure is valuable since it is
theoretically motivated, can be meaningfully interpreted and is reproducible. It is, therefore, an
adequate base on which to generate further differentiation among political regimes, to which we
now turn.
5. PARLIAMENTARY, MIXED AND PRESIDENTIAL DEMOCRACIES
Democracies may be distinguished in several ways: their form of government, type of
electoral system, structure of interest representation, styles of policy-making, nature of party
system, judicial organization, and so on. Each of these distinctions raises important issues about
the way democracies operate and the consequences they have; and each of them has been
addressed, in one way or another, in the political science literature.

20

There is no hierarchical order among the several possible ways of differentiating democracies. In
this section we focus on the rules that specify who may dismiss the government and thus classify
democratic regimes into parliamentary, mixed and presidential. A similar focus will orient the
classification of dictatorships in section 6.
Classifications of forms of democratic government abound in the literature. There seems to
be a general consensus that there are two pure types of systems parliamentary and presidential
and one system that combines features of both commonly called mixed, semi-presidential, or
parliamentary-presidential systems. Our classification is not different in that it also groups
democracies into these three categories. Existing classifications, however, use redundant and/or
insufficient criteria and thus are unable to unambiguously place all cases into one of the three
categories. What is distinctive about the classification we offer here is that it provides a clear set of
operational criteria to classify democratic regimes according to their form of government.
Conceptually, the form of government in a democracy depends on the relationship between
the government, the assembly and, where they exist, elected presidents. The main issue is whether
the government can be removed by the assembly in the course of its constitutional term in office.
Systems in which governments cannot be removed by the assembly are presidential. Systems in
which they can are either parliamentary (when only the assembly is allowed to remove the
government) or mixed (when both the assembly and the elected president can remove the
government). The mechanism of removal by the legislature is the vote of no-confidence initiated
by the legislature, or the vote of confidence, initiated by the government itself (Huber 1996). The
mechanism of removal by the elected president may be direct, such as when she/he can unilaterally
replace the government, partially or completely, or indirect, such as when the president dissolves
the assembly, calls early elections, and thus causes the government to fall.

21

There are several other important aspects related to the nature and/or operation of the
government in democracies, some of which have been made into defining features of democratic
forms of government. They include the nature of the executive power, thought to be collective or
collegial in parliamentarism and individual in presidentialism (Verney 1992, Lijphart 1999:118);
the separation of heads of state and government under parliamentarism and their fusion under
presidentialism (Verney 1992); the indirect election of government in parliamentarism and popular
election in presidentialism (Lijphart 1999:117); the existence of a president with constitutionally
granted lawmaking authority in presidential regimes or with considerable powers in mixed
regimes (Shugart & Carey 1992:19, 24).
These features of democracies, however, are not sufficient to distinguish forms of
governments. Uruguay is a presidential democracy that had at some point (1952-1967), a collective
executive; Israel popularly elects its prime minister and yet cannot be considered a presidential
democracy; in Bolivia the president is, under some circumstances, elected by the assembly and yet
it is not parliamentary; Venezuela prior to the 1999 constitution had a president with no
constitutionally mandated powers and yet was fully recognized as a presidential democracy.
Some might suggest that these constitute anomalous, intermediate cases, hybrid regimes that fall
into neither the parliamentary nor the presidential categories (Mainwaring 1993, Lijphart 1999).
Yet, unless we are able to provide a positive criterion for identifying these regimes, this does not
seem to be a satisfactory solution as it simply creates a residual category that lumps together very
heterogeneous cases. Thus we need to produce a set of criteria that unambiguously classify
democratic regimes according to their form of government.
Systems in which governments, in order to exist, must enjoy the support of a legislative
majority are classified as parliamentary; systems in which governments do not need the support of

22

the legislative majority in order to exist are classified as presidential; and systems in which, in
order to exist, governments depend both on majorities in the legislative assembly and on elected
presidents are classified as mixed. Operationally, the following three questions provide a sequence
of steps summarized in Figure 1 that unambiguously identify presidential, parliamentary and
mixed democracies:
*** Figure 1 here ***
1. Is there an independently (either directly or indirectly) elected president? This is a necessary,
but not a sufficient condition for a presidential regime. In some countries, such as Italy or
Germany, presidents are independently elected, and yet no one claims they are presidential. What
this question allows us to do is to identify countries that, due to the absence of an independently
elected president, cannot be presidential or mixed. They must be, therefore, parliamentary.
2. Is the government responsible to the assembly? Assembly responsibility means that a legislative
majority has the constitutional power to remove the government from office. Given the existence
of an independently elected head of government, the issue becomes whether the assembly plays
any role in the existence of the government. Since assembly responsibility is a necessary condition
for the existence of either a parliamentary or a mixed system, cases where the president is
independently elected and there is no assembly responsibility, cannot be either. They are,
therefore, presidential.11
11

Formally, assemblies may affect both the formation and the survival of governments, and whether it does one or

the other, or both, has been made one of the dimensions along which democratic regimes are classified (Shugart &
Carey 1992, Mainwaring 1993). Yet, the crucial aspect for assembly responsibility is survival and not formation of
the government. Theoretically the former subsumes the latter: an assembly that is deprived of the right to elect the
government but which can pass a vote of no confidence can do so immediately following the constitution of the
government, thus effectively preventing it from coming into existence. Conversely, an assembly that is allowed to

23

3. Is the government responsible to the president? Government responsibility to the president can
be direct, as when the president can dismiss the government either in its entirety or a minister at a
time (such as in Portugal under the 1976 constitution). It can also be indirect, as when the president
dismisses the government by dissolving the assembly (such as in Portugal under the 1982
constitution). This distinction may or may not be relevant for a number of factors,12 but it is not
sufficient to make them different types of regime. In both cases the government depends on the
support of a legislative majority and an independently elected president in order to stay in office.
Thus, given assembly responsibility and an independently elected president, either case is
sufficient to characterize the regime as mixed. Cases in which the president cannot dismiss the
government and dissolve the assembly are classified as parliamentary democracies.
Our classification is entirely based on the rules prescribed in the countrys constitution.
This decision is justified, in part, by the fact that we are dealing with a set of countries that have
been classified as democratic on other grounds. For this reason, it makes sense to take the
constitution as the document that effectively stipulates the way in which governments are formed
and survive in power. In the vast majority of cases this leads to clear and uncontroversial decisions
elect the government may, like in Switzerland and Bolivia, be barred from removing it from office. As Strom
(2000:265) has pointed out, in the real world parliamentarism rarely means that the legislature actually elects the
executive. What matters, he continues, is that the cabinet must be tolerated by the parliamentary majority, not that
the latter actually plays any direct role in the selection of the former (2000:265). Note, also, that the nature of the
executive collective or not is immaterial for the classification of forms of democratic regimes. Thus,
Switzerland, where legislatures elect a collective government which cannot be removed before the end of its term, is
classified as a presidential regime: the assembly does not affect the survival of the government.
12

We believe this is the basis for Shugart & Careys (1992) definition of premier-presidential and president-

parliamentary democracies although it is unclear in their detailed discussion of these systems (pages 55-75)
whether the distinction really matters.

24

since the rules of government formation are well defined and political practice conforms to the
constitutional provisions. In a few cases, however, there will be ambiguity, mostly because some
of the scenarios prescribed by the constitution have never materialized, but also because of
misconceptions induced by the language adopted in the constitution (or in the translation the
authors had to rely on in order to do this work).
The best example of the latter issue comes from South Africa, where the head of state and
government are one and the same person, who is named the President. However, according to the
1996 constitution (as well as the interim 1994 constitution), this president is subject to a vote of
non confidence by a majority of the National Assembly, which, if approved, requires his/her
resignation and the formation of a new government. The fact that votes of non-confidence have
been far from likely in South Africa has nothing to do with the form of government and, we
believe, everything to do with the fact that parliament has been dominated by a party holding about
two-thirds of the seats since competitive elections were held in 1994. Had such a large majority not
existed, the relation between the government and the parliament in South Africa would have been
considerably different, with issues of government survival due to legislative action at the forefront.
Regarding the former issue constitutional scenarios that do not materialize the major
uncertainty emerges with respect to mixed democracies where the room for ambiguity is the
largest, and the feeling that a mixed regime is a pure form of parliamentarism or presidentialism in
disguise is the strongest. In Iceland, for example, the directly elected president is commonly
perceived as a figurehead and symbol of unity rather than a political leader (Kristinsson
1999:87). Hence, as Kristinsson puts it (1999:86), it is customary in Iceland to regard the form of
government as a parliamentary one, essentially similar to the Danish one, despite the different
ways heads of states come into office. Yet, the Icelandic constitution is ambiguous with regard to

25

the powers of the president. At the same time that the president may dissolve parliament (article
24) and appoint and discharge ministers, including the prime minister (article 15), the constitution
also states that ministers execute the power of the president (article 13), thus providing the grounds
for a view of a passive presidency. On the opposite extreme, while many African countries have
adopted French-style, that is, mixed constitutions, there is a strong sense that real power lies
with the president (Bratton and van de Walle 1997, Carlson 1999).
Note, however, that it should matter whether the rules in a country allow for behavior that
is proscribed in another. In almost every instance where the formal rules do not seem to match
practice at a first glance, we find examples of behavior that conform to the constitutional
prerogatives of the president and/or the assembly. Thus, in Iceland, for example, the presidents
constitutional prerogative of choosing the formateur was crucial for bringing to power the coalition
between the Social Democratic Party and the Independence Party that governed between 1959 and
1971. Similarly, the head of states decision to form a non-partisan government after two
legislative elections and successive failed attempts at government formation by different parties
played an important role in the formation of future governments in Iceland (Kristinsson 1999:9394)
With respect to the mixed democracies that may look more like presidential ones, examples
of government changes due to confidence votes, or threats of confidence votes, abound: on April
11, 1995, the prime minister of Central African Republic, Jean-Luc Mandaba resigned upon the
filing of a no-confidence motion signed by a majority of National Assembly members; on May 19,
1993, the prime minister of the Comoro Islands resigned after losing a vote of no-confidence in the
legislature; on June 18, 1995, the Comoran president dissolved the assembly to forestall a vote of
no-confidence in the government; the Congolese government of Stphane Maurice Bongho-

26

Nouarra fell on November 14, 1992, as a result of a vote of no-confidence approved by the
assembly; the government of prime minister Rosny Smarth in Haiti survived a vote of noconfidence on March 27, 1997; in Madagascar, the government of prime minister Emmanuel
Rakotovahiny fell on May 17, 1996, after a motion of no confidence was approved by 109 to 15
votes; in Niger, the government of Souley Abdoulaye resigned on October 16, 1994 after losing a
non-confidence vote in the assembly; faced with the choice of appointing a prime minister
supported by opposition parties or dissolving the National Assembly, Nigers president Mahamane
Ousmane chose to dissolve the assembly and call elections for January 1995; the government of
Abdirizak Hadji Husseing in Somalia lost a vote of non-confidence on July 13, 1964, after which it
resigned. In other countries, such as Albania, Armenia, Brazil (in 1962), Senegal, Sri Lanka and
Taiwan, there is evidence that political practice was clearly guided by the possibility that the
legislature could pass a vote of no confidence in the government.
We thus take constitutional provisions regarding government formation seriously in
classifying parliamentary, presidential and mixed democracies. Given that this classification is
conditional on the fact that the regime is a democracy, that is, on the fact that governments come to
power as a result of contested elections, we distinguish the different ways in which the link
between elections and governments is specified.
6. MONARCHIC, MILITARY, AND CIVILIAN DICTATORSHIPS
The way in which governments are removed from power drives the distinction between
democracies and dictatorships and distinguishes among types of democracies. The method of
removal is no less important for dictatorships. Yet in dictatorships, we know that there is no one
institution, such as elections or lottery, which determines the removal and succession of
authoritarian leaders. Dictatorial regimes, in fact, frequently succumb to internal disputes over

27

leadership succession.
We also know, however, that members of the ruling elite constitute the first major threat to
dictators.13 Dictators, in fact, are frequently deposed by a fellow member of the regime. As a
member of the ruling elite, the usurper is in a privileged position to gain the guns and support he
needs to successfully depose the incumbent. So to mitigate the threat posed by elites, dictators
frequently establish inner sanctums where real decisions are made and potential rivals are kept
under close scrutiny.
We distinguish dictatorships according to the characteristics of these inner sanctums.
Monarchs rely on family and kin networks along with consultative councils; military rulers confine
key potential rivals from the armed forces within juntas; and, civilian dictators usually create a
smaller body within a regime party a political bureau to co-opt potential rivals. Because
decision-making power lies within these small institutions, they generally indicate how power is
organized within the regime, to which forces dictators are responsible, and who may be likely to
remove them.
What is noteworthy of monarchs, both traditionally and currently, is their reliance on their
family and kin networks to come to power and maintain it. Hereditary succession is the rule among
monarchs, but primogeniture is not. As a consequence, family members can play a crucial role in
deliberating on succession to the throne and, by extension, on other important matters. In Kuwait,
for example, succession alternates between two branches of the Sabah family, but the most basic
rule of the succession is that family elects the ruler by consensus, based on the perception by
family leaders of their own best interests (Herb 1999: 80). In Oman, the next-in-line must be a

13

As opposed to threats stemming from within civil society, such as unions, professional associations, religious

institutions, and other larger social groups.

28

male descendant from the al-Said family, but must also be chosen by a family council. Saudi
succession became resolved by a more consensual process after Faysal established the Higher
Committee of Princes as an advisory council to the king on issues of succession. The Committee's
composition was designed to rally the entire family, and the Committee was even given the
authority to supervise the succession in the event of Faysal's death (Bligh 1984: 88).
Military rulers, in turn, come to power through coup dtats and see themselves as
guardians of the national interest, who come to the rescue of a nation at the brink of disaster
wrought by corrupt and myopic civilian politicians. They justify their role as neutral arbiters on
the basis of their membership within the armed forces, an institution that is supposed to stand
above politics. Hence the popularity of titles such as National Redemption Council, Committee
of National Restoration, or Council for National Salvation, to designate the ruling military
junta.
Once in power, military dictators harness the organizational apparatus of the armed forces
to consolidate their rule. Since the armed forces already control the territory through their
monopoly of violence, it takes just a small step to use this apparatus to serve the regime. Rule
typically takes the form of a junta. When coups are led by generals on behalf of the institutional
military, their juntas typically are small and include heads of the various service branches. When
power is seized by lower-ranked members of the military, juntas tend to be larger given the new
rulers need to attract members to their cause. Finer (1988: 260) reports that in contrast to most
Latin American juntas, normally composed of the three or four heads of the service branches,
juntas outside of the region were usually organized by middle-ranking officers and averaged 11
members. The incorporation of the military also takes other forms. Thus, under General Suharto, a
fifth of the Indonesian parliamentary seats were reserved for member of the armed forces, and a

29

soldier was stationed in each village serving as the military representative (Brooker 1995). In
Argentina under the Processo, before it was considered by members of the junta, legislation was
reviewed by various subcommittees within each service branch, as well as by the Legislative
Action Committee, composed by members from each branch. (Fontana 1987).
Internecine fighting among the branches of the armed forces is common. In Chile under
Pinochet, for example, each service branch had its own intelligence service that spied not only on
the population, but on members of other branches (Barros 2002). As a matter of fact, this internal
fighting is one of the biggest constraints on military rulers while in power. The consequence of the
delegation of power and distribution of spoils to the militarys branches may very well serve to
strengthen other members of the military who then overthrow the current dictator. In Argentina,
General Videla was deposed by General Viola, his fellow junta member, who was, in turn, ousted
by General Galtieri. These palace coups occurred in spite of the Argentina generals' careful attempt
to regulate succession. Similarly, in Nigeria, Major General Muhammad Buhari was deposed by
senior members of Supreme Military Council which then decided to install Major General Ibrahim
Babangida as the head of government.
Unlike monarchs and military dictators, civilian rulers do not have a ready-made
organization on which to rely. Most civilian dictators do not have sufficient family and kin
networks to establish permanent dynastic succession, and cannot appeal to the armed forces in the
same way that a military dictator can. To counteract their precarious position and to have an
organization through which they may govern, civilian dictators usually have a regime party, the
necessity of which was most forcefully recognized by Lenin (1921). A party is an instrument by
which the dictatorship can penetrate and control the society (Huntington and Moore 1970).
Members of a single party mobilize popular support and supervise behaviors of people unwilling

30

to identify themselves with the dictator. In exchange, the party offers individuals willing to
collaborate with the regime a vehicle for advancing their careers within a stable system of
patronage. The party also extends access and legitimacy to particular groups in making demands
on the government, and usually a smaller body within the regime party is used to co-opt rivals.
It seems, thus, that we may distinguish types of dictatorships in terms of the nature of their
executive office. Regimes in which the executive comes to and maintains power on the basis of
family and kin networks are classified as monarchies. Regimes in which the executive relies on the
armed forces to come to and stay in power are military. All other dictatorships, many of which
characterized by the presence of a regime party, are civilian. Figure 2 summarizes the steps
necessary for unambiguously identifying each type of dictatorship.
*** Figure 2 here ***
Who Rules? The first step is to identify who is the effective ruler. In democracies, this
identification is easy: it is the president in presidential democracies and the prime minister in
parliamentary and mixed democracies. In dictatorships, identification is frequently unproblematic:
usually the ruler is the president, the king, and, less frequently, the prime minister, the head of the
military junta, the leader of the ruling party or the executioner of the state of emergency. But
sometimes the nominal ruler is not the effective head of the government. In most communist states
the general secretary of the communist party is usually the effective head of government even
though the chairman of the Council of State, or president, is the head of state. In other cases, such
as in Somozas Nicaragua, an minence grise lurks behind the scenes as elections duly occur and
presidents change according to constitutional rules.
Does the head of government bear the title of king and have a hereditary successor and/or
predecessor? The ruler is a monarch if he, first, bears the title of king or emir, and, second,

31

takes power or is replaced by rules of hereditary succession. Most monarchs are identified by the
first rule. The second rule is for slightly more complicated cases in which the title of king has
been taken more recently. In two instances during the post-war period, a member of the armed
forces seized power and declared himself king. If he succeeded in passing power to a family
member, as did Reza Khan to his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in Iran, both members are
considered to be monarchs. If, however, the ruler fails in his succession plans, he is not considered
to be a monarch. Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic falls into the latter category.
A colonel in the army, he seized power in 1966, declared himself Emperor, and planned to have
his son succeed him. His dynastic plans collapsed, however, once he was deposed in 1979.
This rule highlights an important point about modern-day monarchs. In considering
whether a ruler is a rightful successor, we look only at whether the ruler belongs to the current
family in power. We do not determine whether that family or individual has historically wellfounded claims to the throne since contemporary monarchs rule in countries that often were carved
by colonial powers without reference to historical claims or social considerations. British colonial
authorities created the Transjordan state, for example, and installed Abdullah, a member of the
Hashemite family, on its throne. Because he was succeeded by a family member, both Abdullah
and his successors are considered monarchs.
Is the head of government a current or past member of the armed forces? The effective head of
government is a military ruler if he is or was a member of the institutionalized military prior to
taking power.14 Even if retired from service, the shedding of his uniform does not eliminate his
14

Leaders who belonged to the armed forces during World War II, but then left, are an exception. Because almost

all able-bodied men at the time either volunteered or were drafted, membership in the military during only this
period does not count towards ones type. This exception mostly affects those communist rulers of eastern Europe
who fought in World War II.

32

military status. Attempts to appear more palatable to voters who are more accustomed to civilian
rule do not erase these rulers connections and access to the armed forces.
Not included as military dictators are those rulers who come to power as heads of guerilla
movements. Successful insurgency leaders, such as Castro in Cuba, Musaveni in Uganda, and
Kagame in Rwanda, are considered to be civilian rulers. One might object that heads of guerilla
movements, often like military rulers, come to power using violence. In addition, once in power,
these rulers often give themselves military titles or become heads of the armed forces themselves.
Yet there are three good reasons not to consider those involved in guerilla movements as military
leaders. First, not all leaders who originated from guerilla movements were involved in fighting.
Many of them were members of the civilian, political arm of the successful movement and have no
more experience in warfare than the average civilian on the street. In addition, some guerilla
leaders, once they take power, never assume a formal military role. Even though Castro wears
fatigues, the leadership of the Cuban armed forces belongs to Raoul, his brother. Finally, and most
importantly, having never been a member of the armed forces, these leaders do not answer to that
institution. And since the constraints and support offered by the armed forces to one of their
members in power is the main reason for distinguishing military from non-military leaders,
guerilla leaders do not fall into this category.
Is the head neither monarchic nor military? As discussed above, civilian leaders often create a
regime party through which they govern. Yet, unlike kin networks with monarchs and the armed
forces with military rulers, the party does not define the civilian ruler. The diversity of modes of
government is what characterizes them and, for this reason, we think it is best to leave them as a
residual category. Thus, if dictators do not qualify as either monarchs or military rulers, they are
civilian.

33

Our reliance on a single aspect of dictatorships the nature of their executive office
makes our classification unique. Existing classifications of authoritarian regimes are based on
multiple criteria, rely on subjective judgments, and/or are defined, at least in part, by the behavior
of leaders. Braton and van de Walles (1997), for example, identify five regime types, none of
which they call a democracy. Although these regimes may exhaust the range of political
arrangements predominant in postcolonial Africa (p.77), it is not clear they exhaust the space of
possible dictatorships. Moreover, their precise location in each of the two dimensions they
consider competition and participation is not clearly defined, as it depends on their analysis of
the characteristics of the leaders, the nature of the decision-making process, the level of pluralism
among the elites, the policy implementation process, among other factors. Geddes (1999: 20), in
turn, defines some dictatorships as personalist if the leader, who usually came to power as an
officer in a military coup or as the leader of a single-party government, had consolidated control
over policy and recruitment in his own hands, in the process marginalizing other officers
influence and/or reducing the influence and functions of the party. Leaving aside the problems of
observability this definition entails, it is easy to see that it precludes the study of a number of
questions that may be of interest to researchers (since it is based on the behavior to be explained).
Because our coding entails no assumptions about dictators behavior, it allows for the
testing of hypotheses related to the institutional structure of dictatorships. For example, we can
determine if, in fact, military dictators are more likely to allocate greater resources to the armed
forces. We can investigate whether the survival of dictators is due to their economic resources or
their monarchical structure. We can examine whether civilian dictators may be more likely to build
personalist coalitions by spending on private goods since they do not have a ready-made
organization with which to rule. Obviously the classification we offer here will not account for all

34

of the variation we observe in outcomes generated in authoritarian regimes. But it a base upon
which further work can be built. Suppose for example, that military dictators vary quite
significantly in their duration in power, with some surviving for no more than one or two years
while others hold on to power for quite a long time. We, then, can determine whether the
difference is due to the conditions under which they govern or some other objective trait about the
military dictators themselves, such as their rank. But making such further distinctions is impossible
if we do not first objectively identify the set of military dictators and determine the degree to
which membership in the armed forces is an explanatory factor. Similarly, if some civilian
dictators are better able to consolidate power, we can determine whether other factors, such as their
previous political experience or their control of a nationalist movement, explain their success. The
answer will not be found by ex ante collapsing these leaders into a single category with a new
label.
CONCLUSION
The empirical testing of hypotheses related to the emergence and survival of regimes, and
their consequences for policies and outcomes, remains the focus of much of the disciplines
research agenda. We join an increasingly large number of scholars who advocates careful choice of
measurement as a function of the research questions under investigation, as well as conceptual and
operational clarity of the instrument to be used. (e.g., Gleditsch and Ward 1997, Reiter and
Tillman 2002, Treier and Jackman 2003). We also offer an alternative to existing measures of
political regimes.
We have, thus, a six-fold classification of political regimes that emphasizes the institutions
capable of removing the government from power. Among democracies, we distinguish
parliamentary (only the legislature can remove the government), presidential (only the president

35

can remove the government) and mixed (both the legislature and the president can remove the
government) regimes. In dictatorships we distinguish monarchic (family and kin networks remove
the government), military (the armed forces remove the government) and civilian (a residual
category often characterized by the presence of a political party as the institution capable of
determining the fate of existing governments) regimes.
This classification is not the only possible one, as both democracies and dictatorships may
and have been distinguished in many different ways. Yet, it does posses the same attributes of the
classification of regimes as democracies and dictatorships on which it is rooted. Because it is based
on observational data, it is reproducible, a characteristic that is not present in any of the existing
alternative measures of political regimes. Moreover, the regime classification presented here, again
contrary to other measures, can be meaningfully interpreted as it is based on attributes of political
regimes that are identifiable and recognized as important by most researchers. Finally, as
suggested throughout the paper, this classification is useful in addressing a number of important
research questions that have been shaping the agenda of contemporary political scientists.

36

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42

Figure 1
Classifying Forms of Democratic Government

DEMOCRACIES

Is there an independently
elected president?
NO

YES

PARLIAMENTARY

Is there government
responsibility to
elected assembly?
YES

NO

Is the government responsible to

the president?

PRESIDENTIAL

NO

PARLIAMENTARY

YES

MIXED

43

Figure 2
Classifying Forms of Dictatorial Government

DICTATORSHIPS

Who is the effective head of

government?

Does the effective head:

1) bear the title of king and
2) have a hereditary successor
and/or predecessor?
YES

NO

MONARCH

Is the effective head a

current or past member
of the armed forces?

YES

NO

MILITARY

CIVILIAN

44

Appendix: Classification of Democracies and Dictatorships, 1946-2002

PARL=Parliamentary democracy
MIX = Mixed democracy
PRES = Presidential democracy
COUNTRY
Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Albania
Albania
Albania
Albania
Algeria
Algeria
Andorra
Angola
Antigua
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Argentina
Armenia
Armenia
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belgium
Belize
Benin
Benin
Benin
Benin
Benin
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bosnia-Herz.
Botswana
Brazil
Brazil
Brazil
Brazil
Brazil
Brunei
Bulgaria

Entry
1946
1953
1963
1973
1946
1985
1992
1998
1962
1965
1993
1975
1981
1946
1955
1958
1962
1963
1966
1973
1976
1983
1991
1995
1946
1946
1991
1973
1971
1971
1977
1981
1982
1990
1991
1966
1991
1946
1981
1960
1963
1970
1972
1991
1971
1946
1947
1951
1952
1964
1979
1980
1982
1991
1966
1946
1961
1963
1964
1979
1984
1946

Exit
1952
1962
1972
2002
1984
1991
1997
2002
1964
2002
2002
2002
2002
1954
1957
1961
1962
1965
1972
1975
1982
2002
1994
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
1976
1980
1981
1989
1990
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
1962
1969
1971
1990
2002
2002
1946
1950
1951
1963
1978
1979
1981
2002
2002
2002
1960
1962
1963
1978
2002
2000
1989

CIV = Civilian dictatorship

MIL = Military dictatorship
MON = Monarchic dictatorship
Regime
MON
CIV
MON
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIX
PARL
CIV
MIL
PARL
CIV
PARL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
PRES
MIX
PARL
PARL
CIV
PARL
MON
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
PARL
PARL
CIV
PARL
PARL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
MON
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
CIV
CIV
PRES
MIX
PRES
MIL
PRES
MON
CIV

COUNTRY
Entry
Bulgaria
1990
Burkina Faso 1960
Burkina Faso 1966
Burundi
1962
Burundi
1966
Burundi
1993
Burundi
1996
Cambodia
1953
Cambodia
1955
Cambodia
1966
Cambodia
1967
Cambodia
1969
Cambodia
1975
Cambodia
1979
Cambodia
1991
Cameroon
1960
Canada
1946
Cape Verde
1975
Cape Verde
1991
Central Afr. Rep 1960
Central Afr. Rep 1966
Central Afr. Rep 1979
Central Afr. Rep 1981
Central Afr. Rep 1993
Chad
1960
Chad
1975
Chad
1979
Chad
1990
Chile
1946
Chile
1973
Chile
1990
China
1946
China
1949
Colombia
1946
Colombia
1949
Colombia
1953
Colombia
1958
Comoros
1975
Comoros
1990
Comoros
1995
Comoros
1999
Congo (Braz.) 1960
Congo (Braz.) 1968
Congo (Braz.) 1992
Congo (Braz.) 1997
Costa Rica
1946
Costa Rica
1948
Costa Rica
1949
Croatia
1991
Cuba
1946
Cuba
1952
Cuba
1959
Cyprus
1960
Greek Cyprus 1983
Czech Republic 1993
Czechoslovakia 1946
Czechoslovakia 1990
Denmark
1946
Djibouti
1977
Dominica
1978
Dominican Rep. 1946
Dominican Rep. 1961

45

Exit
2002
1965
2002
1965
1992
1995
2002
1954
1965
1966
1968
1974
1978
1990
2002
2002
2002
1990
2002
1965
1978
1980
1992
2002
1974
1978
1989
2002
1972
1989
2002
1948
2002
1948
1952
1957
2002
1989
1994
1998
2002
1967
1991
1996
2002
1947
1948
2002
2002
1951
1958
2002
1982
2002
2002
1989
1992
2002
2002
2002
1960
1962

Regime
PARL
CIV
MIL
MON
MIL
PRES
MIL
MON
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
CIV
PARL
CIV
PARL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
MIX
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
CIV
PRES
CIV
MIL
PRES
CIV
MIX
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
MIX
MIL
PRES
CIV
PRES
MIX
PRES
MIL
CIV
CIV
PRES
PARL
CIV
PARL
PARL
CIV
PARL
MIL
CIV

COUNTRY
Entry
Dominican Rep. 1963
Dominican Rep. 1965
Dominican Rep. 1966
Ecuador
1946
Ecuador
1947
Ecuador
1948
Ecuador
1963
Ecuador
1966
Ecuador
1972
Ecuador
1979
Ecuador
2000
Egypt
1946
Egypt
1952
El Salvador
1946
El Salvador
1980
El Salvador
1982
El Salvador
1984
Equatorial Guin. 1968
Equatorial Guin. 1979
Eritrea
1993
Estonia
1991
Ethiopia
1946
Ethiopia
1974
Ethiopia
1991
Ethiopia2
1993
Fiji
1970
Fiji
1987
Fiji
1999
Fiji
2000
Fiji
2001
Finland
1946
Finland
2000
France
1946
France
1958
Gabon
1960
Gambia
1965
Gambia
1994
Georgia
1991
West Germany 1949
Germany
1990
East Germany 1949
Ghana
1957
Ghana
1966
Ghana
1969
Ghana
1972
Ghana
1979
Ghana
1981
Ghana
1993
Greece
1946
Greece
1967
Greece
1974
Grenada
1974
Grenada
1979
Grenada
1984
Guatemala
1946
Guatemala
1954
Guatemala
1958
Guatemala
1963
Guatemala
1966
Guatemala
1982
Guatemala
1986
Guinea
1958

Exit
1964
1965
2002
1946
1947
1962
1965
1971
1978
1999
2002
1951
2002
1979
1981
1983
2002
1978
2002
2002
2002
1973
1990
1992
2002
1986
1998
1999
2000
2002
1999
2002
1957
2002
2002
1993
2002
2002
1989
2002
1989
1965
1968
1971
1978
1980
1992
2002
1966
1973
2002
1978
1983
2002
1953
1957
1962
1965
1981
1985
2002
1983

Regime
MIL
CIV
PRES
CIV
MIL
PRES
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
CIV
MON
MIL
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
CIV
MIL
CIV
PARL
MON
MIL
CIV
CIV
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIX
PARL
PARL
MIX
CIV
CIV
MIL
CIV
PARL
PARL
CIV
CIV
MIL
PARL
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
PARL
MIL
PARL
PARL
CIV
PARL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
CIV

COUNTRY
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Guyana
Haiti
Haiti
Haiti
Haiti
Haiti
Haiti
Haiti
Honduras
Honduras
Honduras
Honduras
Honduras
Honduras
Honduras
Honduras
Hungary
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia
Iran
Iran
Iraq
Iraq
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Cote d'Ivoire
Cote d'Ivoire
Cote d'Ivoire
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kenya
Kiribati
Korea, North
Korea, North
Korea, South
Korea, South
Korea, South
Korea, South
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Laos PDR
Laos PDR
Laos PDR
Laos PDR
Latvia
Lebanon
Lebanon
Lebanon
Lebanon
Lebanon
Lesotho
Lesotho
Lesotho
Liberia
Liberia

Entry
1984
1974
1980
2000
1966
1992
1946
1950
1956
1986
1990
1991
1994
1946
1949
1956
1957
1963
1971
1972
1982
1946
1990
1946
1947
1946
1966
1999
1946
1979
1946
1958
1979
1946
1948
1946
1960
1999
2000
1962
1947
1946
1991
1963
1998
1979
1948
1994
1948
1960
1961
1988
1961
1991
1954
1959
1962
1992
1991
1946
1975
1988
1989
1998
1966
1986
1993
1946
1980

Exit
2002
1979
1999
2002
1991
2002
1949
1955
1985
1989
1990
1993
2002
1948
1955
1956
1962
1970
1971
1981
2002
1989
2002
2002
2002
1965
1998
2002
1978
2002
1957
1978
2002
2002
2002
2002
1998
1999
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
1997
2002
2002
1993
2002
1959
1960
1987
2002
2002
2002
1958
1961
1991
2002
2002
1974
1987
1988
1997
2002
1985
1992
2002
1979
1989

Regime
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
CIV
PRES
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
MIX
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
CIV
PARL
MIX
PARL
CIV
MIL
PRES
MON
CIV
MON
MIL
CIV
PARL
PARL
PARL
CIV
MIL
PRES
PARL
PARL
MON
CIV
CIV
PRES
PARL
MIL
CIV
CIV
PARL
MIL
PRES
MON
CIV
PARL
MIL
CIV
MIL
PARL
PARL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
PARL
CIV
MIL

COUNTRY
Entry
Liberia
1990
Libya
1952
Libya
1969
Liechtenstein 1990
Lithuania
1991
Luxembourg
1946
Macedonia
1991
Madagascar
1960
Madagascar
1972
Madagascar
1993
Malawi
1964
Malawi
1994
Malaysia
1957
Maldive Islands 1965
Maldive Islands 1968
Mali
1960
Mali
1968
Mali
1992
Malta
1964
Marshall Islands 1991
Mauritania
1960
Mauritania
1978
Mauritius
1968
Mexico
1946
Mexico
1952
Mexico
1958
Mexico
2000
Micronesia,
1991
Moldova
1991
Moldova
1996
Mongolia
1946
Mongolia
1992
Morocco
1956
Mozambique 1975
Myanmar
1948
Myanmar
1958
Myanmar
1960
Myanmar
1962
Namibia
1990
Nauru
1968
Nepal
1946
Nepal
1951
Nepal
1991
Nepal
2002
Netherlands
1946
New Zealand 1946
Nicaragua
1946
Nicaragua
1956
Nicaragua
1967
Nicaragua
1979
Nicaragua
1984
Niger
1960
Niger
1974
Niger
1993
Niger
1996
Niger
2000
Nigeria
1960
Nigeria
1966
Nigeria
1979
Nigeria
1983
Nigeria
1999
Norway
1946
Oman
1951
Pakistan
1947
Pakistan
1956
Pakistan
1971
Pakistan
1972
Pakistan
1977
Pakistan
1988

Exit
2002
1968
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
1971
1992
2002
1993
2002
2002
1967
2002
1967
1991
2002
2002
2002
1977
2002
2002
1951
1957
1999
2002
2002
1995
2002
1991
2002
2002
2002
1957
1959
1961
2002
2002
2002
1950
1990
2001
2002
2002
2002
1955
1966
1978
1983
2002
1973
1992
1995
1999
2002
1965
1978
1982
1998
2002
2002
2002
1955
1970
1971
1976
1987
1998

46

Regime
CIV
MON
MIL
PARL
MIX
PARL
PARL
CIV
MIL
MIX
CIV
PRES
CIV
MON
CIV
CIV
MIL
MIX
PARL
PRES
CIV
MIL
PARL
CIV
MIL
CIV
PRES
PRES
CIV
MIX
CIV
MIX
MON
CIV
PARL
MIL
PARL
MIL
PRES
PARL
CIV
MON
PARL
MON
PARL
PARL
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
PRES
CIV
MIL
MIX
MIL
MIX
PARL
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
PARL
MON
PARL
MIL
CIV
MIX
MIL
PARL

COUNTRY
Entry
Pakistan
1999
Palau
1994
Panama
1946
Panama
1949
Panama
1951
Panama
1952
Panama
1968
Panama
1989
Papua N G
1975
Paraguay
1946
Paraguay
1948
Paraguay
1954
Paraguay
1993
Peru
1946
Peru
1948
Peru
1956
Peru
1962
Peru
1963
Peru
1968
Peru
1980
Peru
1990
Peru
2001
Philippines
1946
Philippines
1965
Philippines
1986
Poland
1946
Poland
1981
Poland
1989
Portugal
1946
Portugal
1974
Portugal
1976
Qatar
1971
Romania
1946
Romania
1965
Romania
1990
Russia
1991
Rwanda
1962
Rwanda
1973
San Marino
1992
Sao Tome
1975
Sao Tome
1991
Saudi Arabia
1946
Senegal
1960
Senegal
2000
Seychelles
1976
Sierra Leone
1961
Sierra Leone
1967
Sierra Leone
1968
Sierra Leone
1985
Sierra Leone
1996
Sierra Leone
1997
Sierra Leone
1998
Singapore
1965
Slovak Republic 1993
Slovenia
1991
Solomon Islands 1978
Somalia
1960
Somalia
1969
Somalia
1991
Somaliland
1991
Somaliland
2002
South Africa
1946
South Africa
1994
Spain
1946
Spain
1975
Spain
1977
Sri Lanka
1948
Sri Lanka
1977
Sri Lanka
1989

Exit
2002
2002
1948
1950
1951
1967
1988
2002
2002
1947
1953
1992
2002
1947
1955
1961
1962
1967
1979
1989
2000
2002
1964
1985
2002
1980
1988
2002
1973
1975
2002
2002
1964
1989
2002
2002
1972
2002
2002
1990
2002
2002
1999
2002
2002
1966
1967
1984
1995
1996
1997
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
1968
1990
2002
2001
2002
1993
2002
1974
1976
2002
1976
1988
2002

Regime
MIL
PRES
CIV
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
PARL
MIL
CIV
MIL
CIV
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
CIV
PRES
PRES
CIV
PRES
CIV
MIL
MIX
CIV
MIL
MIX
MON
CIV
CIV
MIX
MIX
CIV
MIL
PRES
CIV
MIX
MON
CIV
MIX
CIV
PARL
MIL
CIV
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
CIV
PARL
PARL
PARL
MIX
MIL
CIV
CIV
MIL
CIV
PARL
MIL
CIV
PARL
PARL
CIV
MIX

COUNTRY
St. Kitts
St. Lucia
St. Vincent
Sudan
Sudan
Sudan
Sudan
Sudan
Sudan
Sudan
Suriname
Suriname
Suriname
Suriname
Suriname
Swaziland
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Syria
Syria
Syria
Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Thailand
Thailand

Entry
1983
1979
1979
1956
1958
1964
1965
1969
1986
1989
1975
1980
1988
1990
1991
1968
1946
1946
1946
1949
1955
1963
1949
1975
1996
1991
1961
1946
1973
1975

Exit
2002
2002
2002
1957
1963
1964
1968
1985
1988
2002
1979
1987
1989
1990
2002
2002
2002
2002
1948
1954
1962
2002
1974
1995
2002
2002
2002
1972
1974
1975

Regime
PARL
PARL
PARL
PARL
MIL
CIV
PARL
MIL
PARL
MIL
PARL
MIL
PRES
MIL
PRES
MON
PARL
PRES
CIV
MIL
CIV
MIL
MIL
CIV
MIX
CIV
CIV
MIL
CIV
PARL

COUNTRY
Entry
Thailand
1976
Thailand
1983
Thailand
1991
Thailand
1992
Togo
1960
Togo
1967
Tonga
1970
Trin. & Tob
1962
Tunisia
1956
Tunisia
1987
Turkey
1946
Turkey
1950
Turkey
1960
Turkey
1961
Turkey
1980
Turkey
1983
Turkmenistan 1991
U.S.S.R.
1946
U.S.S.R.
1982
Uganda
1962
Uganda
1971
Uganda
1979
Uganda
1980
Uganda
1985
Uganda
1986
Ukraine
1991
Un. Arab Em. 1971
United Kingdom1946
United States 1946
Uruguay
1946
Uruguay
1973

Exit
1982
1990
1991
2002
1966
2002
2002
2002
1986
2002
1949
1959
1960
1979
1982
2002
2002
1981
1990
1970
1978
1979
1984
1985
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
1972
1984

47

Regime
MIL
PARL
MIL
PARL
CIV
MIL
MON
PARL
CIV
MIL
MIL
CIV
MIL
PARL
MIL
PARL
CIV
CIV
CIV
CIV
MIL
CIV
PRES
MIL
CIV
MIX
MON
PARL
PRES
PRES
MIL

COUNTRY
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela
Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam
Western Samoa
Yemen Arab R.
Yemen Arab R.
Rep of Yemen
Yemen PDR
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia2
Zaire (Congo)
Zaire (Congo)
Zaire (Congo)
Zambia
Zambia
Zimbabwe

Entry
1985
1991
1980
1946
1948
1959
1976
1997
2001
1962
1967
1974
1990
1967
1946
1991
1960
1965
1997
1964
1991
1965

Exit
2002
2002
2002
1947
1958
2002
1996
2000
2002
2002
1973
1989
2002
1989
1990
2002
1964
1996
2002
1990
2002
2002

Regime
PRES
CIV
PARL
PRES
MIL
PRES
CIV
MIL
CIV
MON
CIV
MIL
MIL
CIV
CIV
CIV
CIV
MIL
CIV
CIV
PRES
CIV

Jose Antonio Cheibub and Jennifer Gandhi

"Classifying Political Regimes: A Six Fold Classification of Democracies and
Dictatorships"
Yale University, 2004
COUNTRY NAME: See appendix 1.
COUNTRY: Country number, according to the 1950-1990 data wet used in Democracy
and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
CTYALPHA: Country number, in alphabetical order by country name.
YEAR: Year from 1946 to 2002.
FLAGC: Dummy variable coded 1 in the first year the country is observed, 0 otherwise.
REG: Regime classification
1 = Dictatorship
0 = Democracy.
REGLAG: Lagged REG
AGER: Age in years of the current regime as classified by REG. The year in which the
regime comes into existence is coded as 1. When applicable, ages were extended back as
far as 1870.
TJK: Dummy variable coded 1 if a regime transition (as classified by REG) occurred at
any time during the current year, and the regime at the end of the year was different from
the regime at the beginning of the year, 0 otherwise.
TJKLAG: Lagged TJK.
FLAGR: Dummy variable coded 1 in the first year of each regime spell (as classified by
REG), 0 otherwise.
RSPELL: Number of successive spells of political regimes as classified by REG. A spell
is defined as years of continuous rule under the same regime.
INST: Classification of political regimes in which democracies are distinguished by the
type of executive. Coded 0 if dictatorship; 1 if parliamentary democracy; 2 if mixed
democracy; 3 if presidential democracies. Transition years are coded as the regime that
emerges in that year.
INSTLAG: Lagged INST.

TTI: Dummy variable coded 1 if a regime transition (as classified by INST) occurred at
any time during the current year, and the regime at the end of the year was different from
the regime at the beginning of the year, 0 otherwise.
AGEI: Age in years of the current regime as classified by INST.
FLAGI: Dummy variable coded 1 in the first year of each regime spell (as classified by
INST), 0 otherwise.
ISPELL: Number of successive spells of political regimes as classified by INST. A spell
is defined as years of continuous rule under the same regime.
INST2: Identical to INST, except for the cases that resulted in a transition from above (by
the incumbent). In these cases the incumbent rule (INCUMB) for classification of
democracies and dictatorships was not applied and the regime was classified as
parliamentary, mixed or presidential.
INST2LAG: Lagged INST2.
TTI2: Dummy variable coded 1 if a regime transition (as classified by INST2) occurred
at any time during the current year, and the regime at the end of the year was different
from the regime at the beginning of the year, 0 otherwise.
AGEI2: Age in years of the current regime as classified by INST2.
FLAGI2: Dummy variable coded 1 in the first year of each regime spell (as classified by
INST2), 0 otherwise.
I2SPELL: Number of successive spells of political regimes as classified by INST2. A
spell is defined as years of continuous rule under the same regime.
CONFID: Dummy variable coded 1 for the years (in mixed democracies, as defined by
INST2, in which a vote of confidence was threatened or actually voted).
TYPEII: Type II error variable. See Democracy and Development, chapter 1, for
definition and discussion of this variable.
INCUMB: Consolidation of incumbent advantage indicator. See Democracy and
Development, chapter 1, for definition and discussion of this variable.
FLAGE: Dummy variable coded 1 for the last year a regime was observed, 0 otherwise.
STRA: The sum of past transitions to authoritarianism (as defined by REG) in a country.
If a country experienced one or more transitions to authoritarianism before 1946, STRA
was coded 1 in 1946.

HINST: Six-fold classification of political regimes, coded 0 if a parliamentary

democracy, 1 if a mixed democracy, 2 if a presidential democracy, 3 if a civilian
dictatorship, 4 if a military dictatorship, and 5 if a monarchic dictatorship.
HINSTLAG: Lagged HINST.
FHINST: Dummy variable coded 1 in the first year of each regime spell (as classified by
HINST), 0 otherwise.
AGEHINST: Age in years of the current regime as classified by HINST.
ISPELL: Number of successive spells of political regimes as classified by INST. A spell
is defined as years of continuous rule under the same regime.
PREVINST: Type of regime that existed prior to the current regime. Codes 1 through 5
identical to HINST. Two additional codes: -1 if a colony and -2 if it is impossible to
determine due to fact that the country/regime has existed since time immemorial.
TTHINST: Dummy variable coded 1 if a regime transition (as classified by TTHINST)
occurred at any time during the current year, and the regime at the end of the year was
different from the regime at the beginning of the year, 0 otherwise.
ODWP: Other democracies in the world, percentage. Percentage of democratic regimes
(as defined by REG) in the current year (other than the regime under consideration) in the
world.