Annual Report HAIT

Varieties of Political Regimes (Va-PoReg)

Jedes Regime. Jedes Land. Seit 1900.

Steffen Kailitz

Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung e.V. an der TU Dresden

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7251-3265

Keywords: Extremism Research, Comparative Autocracy Research, Va-PoReg, Global Political Regimes

---

Abstract

China, Myanmar, and Saudi Arabia are all considered undemocratic in measures of democracy. Yet their rule is based on fundamentally different forms of legitimacy. This is where the research project “Varieties of Political Regimes” (Va-PoReg) comes in: It asks not only how democratic a regime is, but what kind of regime it has. Va-PoReg distinguishes, for example, between communist ideocracies, military autocracies, and autocratic monarchies, and tracks political regimes worldwide since 1900, including colonial systems of rule. Regime changes are dated based on observable events and identified at the tipping points at which the threshold to a different regime type is crossed. Using the examples of the United States, Venezuela, and Hungary, this story illustrates why the gradual erosion of democracy and an actual change in regime type must be analytically distinguished. A dataset, codebook, country reports, interactive world maps, and charts explore the evolution of political regimes from various perspectives and reveal how regime types have spread, changed, and disappeared over more than a century—and how many people live under them. Va-PoReg thus combines comparative regime research with digital knowledge transfer and sharpens our focus on the critical threshold: the point at which gradual change becomes regime change.

---

Author Biography

Steffen Kailitz, Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung e.V. an der TU Dresden

• Since 2007 academic researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the TU Dresden
• 2010–2011 temporary professorship in Comparative Government at the University of Erfurt and the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy
• 2008–2009 temporary professorship for Comparative Political Science at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University Greifswald
• 1998–2007 academic researcher at the TU Chemnitz at the Chair of Political Systems, Political Institutions