TY - JOUR
T1 - The latent characteristics that structure autocratic rule
AU - Wright, Joseph
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments. This research is funded by the Minerva Research Initiative (ONR #N000141211004). The author thanks Jos Bartman, José Cheibub, Michael Coppedge, Rob Franzese, Fabrice Lehoucq, Michael Miller, Bumba Mukerjee, Phil Schrodt, Daniel Stegmueller, Milan Svolik, and participants at the University of Illinois Comparative Politics Workshop (2/2014), an APSA panel (9/2014), the “Political Institutions and the Behavior of States in the International System” (4/2015) conference at Yale, and the Lansing B. Lee, Jr. Seminar in Global Politics at the University of Virginia (9/2015) for helpful feedback. The data introduced in this paper were collected by Barbara Geddes and her team at UCLA; this project and resulting research was supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-0904478 and BCS-0904463). James Honaker also contributed to earlier versions of this paper. Reproduction files can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/3BC21O.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The European Political Science Association.
PY - 2021/1
Y1 - 2021/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1017/psrm.2019.50
DO - 10.1017/psrm.2019.50
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85091471444
SN - 2049-8470
VL - 9
SP - 1
EP - 19
JO - Political Science Research and Methods
JF - Political Science Research and Methods
IS - 1
ER -