This article describes the conceptual foundations and coding procedures used in developing the Political Regime Change Dataset. This dataset identifies the dates of transition among democratic, semidemocratic, authoritarian, and transitional regimes in the 97 largest Third World countries, covering periods beginning with the date at which each country became independent or established a modern state and continuing through 1992. These transition dates can be used to generate time series indicating which of these types of regime existed in each country at any given time during the periods covered by the dataset. This article gives the distribution of regime changes across time and geographical regions and compares the Political Regime Change Dataset with several other widely used measures of regimes. A complete listing of the data is included in the appendix.
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