This typology of authoritarian regimes is based on a distinction between three modes of political power maintenance (probably the three most widely used throughout history): hereditary succession (lineage), corresponding to monarchies; the actual or threatened use of military force, corresponding to military regimes; and popular elections, designating electoral regimes. Among the latter we distinguish among no-party regimes (where all parties are prohibited), one-party regimes (where all but one party is prohibited), and limited multiparty regimes (where multiple parties are allowed but the system still does not pass as democratic); a subtype of these regimes where no parties are present, although not being prohibited, are coded as "partyless'' regimes. A subtype of military regimes are coded "rebel regimes'', where a rebel movement has taken power by military means. We also code hybrids (or amalgams) combining elements from more than one regime type, as well as several minor types of regimes: "theocracies'', "transitional'' regimes, "civil war'', foreign "occupation'', and a residual "other'' category. Using the mean of the Freedom House and Polity scales (fh_ipolity2), the line between democracies and autocracies is drawn at 7.5. This threshold value was chosen by estimating the mean cutoff point separating democracy from autocracy in five well-known categorical measures of democracy: those of Przeworski et al. (2000), Mainwaring et al. (2001), and Reich (2002), together with Freedom House's and Polity's own categorical thresholds for democracy.

1. Limited Multiparty
2. Partyless
3. No-Party
4. Military
5. Military No-Party
6. Military Multiparty
7. Military One-party
8. One-Party
9. Other
10. One-Party Monarchy
11. Monarchy
12. Rebel Regime
13. Civil War
14. Occupation
15. Theocracy
16. Transitional Regime
17. No-Party Monarchy
18. Multiparty Monarchy
19. Multiparty-Occupied
20. Democracy