Instruments of quantification of the political regime types within the security studies

Abstract

Measuring the quality of political regimes is a field that occupies a traditional place in statistical studies that have the subject of studying the characteristics of the political system as an important segment of the explanation of the behavior of states in international relations. In a desire for a comprehensive and complete spatial and temporal interaction, researchers seek to classify data categories through an extremely complex set that represents the starting point for further research. The aim of this article is a comparative overview of the most used quantitative instruments of the level of the political regime. In addition, the author points to the advantages or limitations of certain databases. The subject of the comparative presentation are the following databases: Polity IV, Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy-LIED, Authoritarian Regime Dataset, Varieties of Democracy, and other data sets relevant to statistical testing. In addition, the author presents the problems that researchers in security studies meet in "measuring" the level of the political regime, that is, quantifying the relationship between democracy and autocracy. The method of descriptive statistics will be used in order to present the most important statistical cross-sections of the instruments used in modern research.