The latent characteristics that structure autocratic rule

Abstract

Research on autocratic regimes in comparative politics and international relations often uses categorical typologies of autocratic regimes to distinguish among different forms of autocracy. This paper introduces historical data on dozens of features of dictatorships to estimate latent dimensions of autocratic rule. We identify three time-varying dimensions of autocracy that correspond to ideal types proposed in the literature: party dominance, military rule, and personalism. We show that dimensions of autocratic rule are orthogonal to commonly-used measures of democracy–autocracy, and compare these dimensions to existing typologies of autocracies, showing that time-varying information on personalism is unique. We discuss a measurement model of personalism and illustrate the time-varying features of this measure in applied research on conflict initiation and regime collapse.

Don’t turn around, der Kommissar’s in town: Political officers and coups d’état in authoritarian regimes

“…However, critiques have been raised that the use of these broad regime typologies can lead to a number of theoretical and measurement issues (Weeks, 2014; Wilson, 2014; Morgenbesser, 2017). Wright (2021) suggested that rather than categories, we should draw upon time-varying regime features to better capture the specific feature effects previously linked to regime types.…”

Thin-skinned leaders: regime legitimation, protest issues, and repression in autocracies

“…15 Model 5 accounts for several observable economic and political factors such as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (log-transformed), population size (log-transformed) (World Bank, 2019), and V-Dem's electoral democracy index that measures the quality of elections and other democratic features (Coppedge et al, 2020). We also assess whether the executive's power base is determined by the military (military dimension index) or a ruling party (ruling party dimension index) (Coppedge et al, 2020) to account for important differences between autocracies (Teorell and Lindberg, 2019;Wright, 2019). Further, we account for overall state repression by assessing states' respect for human rights (Fariss, 2014).…”

The Effects of Autocratic Characteristics on Public Opinion toward Democracy Promotion Policies: A Conjoint Analysis

“…Our primary variables of concern are thus the three most relevant features along which dictatorships differ as identified by the extant comparative literature: Personalism, ruler type, and electoral competition. These three traits (and their combinations) constitute the key characteristics that structure autocratic rule (Wright 2019), and that are typically used to classify these regimes into broadly used categorical or continuous regime typologies (Huntington 1991;Geddes 1999;Hadenius and Teorell 2007;Gandhi 2008;Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland 2010;Svolik 2012;Weeks 2014;Geddes, Wright and Frantz 2018).…”