Some Tips for the Regime Classification Project

If you have been doing the readings, you may have noticed at least five different classification systems for political regimes - each of them geared towards asking somewhat different questions, and making different assumptions about what characteristics of political systems are most important for answering these questions. If your system replicates or modifies or improves on any of these, you would be doing great (this stuff is hard):

1. Gandhi splits the world according to whether the main political leaders are regularly selected via competitive elections, and argues that it is best to err on the side of calling somebody a "dictator" if you cannot (yet) show that they would give up power when losing an election. What are the advantages of this method? What questions is it designed to answer? What explanation does Gandhi give for focusing on elections? (Her system ultimately has four categories - democracy, civilian dictatorship, military dictatorship, and monarchies, but the dividing line between democracies and the rest is the presence of competitive elections). 
2. Levitsky and Way divide the world  into five categories: full democracies, authoritarian regimes, and three types of hybrid regimes: competitive authoritarian regimes, tutelary regimes, and constitutional oligarchies or exclusive republics. But they focus mostly on competitive authoritarian regimes. Why this classification? What important features of political regimes is it designed to bring out? What questions is it designed to answer? (Do you understand what each of the five categories refers to, and can you give examples? Potential exam question there!)
3. Bueno de Mesquita et al. divide the world with a continuous scale measuring the size of the "winning coalition" and the "selectorate." (What are these things? Potential exam question, again). In theory, they would like to know the exact size of the coalition and the exact size of the selectorate, but in practice these things are difficult to measure, so they use "proxies" - imperfect measures of the things they are actually interested in. And they end up making broad statements about small coalition vs. large coalition regimes. What sorts of question is their system designed to answer? What are some advantages and disadvantages? Could coalition size be measured in other ways?
4. Magaloni and Kricheli extend Gandhi by adding two categories: they split Gandhi's "civilian dictatorship"category into "single party" and "dominant party" regimes, and add a category for "anarchy." What is their system designed to measure? What questions is it designed to answer? Why is the difference between democracies, dominant party, and single-party regimes important, in their view?
5. Finally, Coppedge, Gerring et. al. are explicitly concerned with measuring democracy, but they take a disaggregated approach: instead of saying this country is democratic or not, or giving each country a single score, they look at many different components and indicators of democracy, and argue that we should look at democracy as a multidimensional concept. They list some 35 or so potential components of democracy. What kinds of questions can this approach help answer? What are some of its advantages and disadvantages? Why might you care about measuring whether a country is democratic in this broad sense?

What other characteristics of political systems could we focus on, and what kinds of questions could we ask by focusing on these characteristics? (Lots of possibilities here! Polity IV, Freedom House, and The Economist do things differently again - you might get ideas to criticize or improve from looking at some of these links).

Other points you might wish to think about when designing your systems (these are more practical - you don't need to consider every single detail, just something to think about):

1. Where can you (or others) find the required information? Should you restrict research to specific sources to ensure consistency, or should everything go? Remember that as you go back in time (or to smaller countries), information becomes harder to find.
2. Do you want to focus on a particular region, or the whole world? How far back in time do you need to go to give a useful answer to your question? (The default - what I will assign if you don't have other ideas - is all countries with over 500,000 population today, in 2011, 1996, and 1981, but you may think that's not quite what you need. This works out to about 3 countries per person, with each country being rated by 2 people).
3. How many people should rate each country so that judgments are reliable? 2? 3? 4? More? (The default is 2, if you leave the decision to me).
4. Test how your system works in specific cases. What answer should you get for, say, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Russia, Venezuela, China, and North Korea? What answer should you get for countries experiencing civil war, or for countries that split in two? What about colonies - should the system extend to those? What about regime changes in the middle of the year? Foreign intervention? 
5. Do you have any specific ideas about data entry - e.g., a form like last year's project? (You can leave this part to me, but  you may have your own ideas).
6. If you have more than one indicator, do you want to aggregate these into a single index? 

Again, these are only things to think about - if you don't have answers to each of these questions, that's fine too. But it might help your system work better. You can ask or answer questions in comments below.