Editor's Notes: A Beastiary of Dictators and Totalitarians

There is a great deal of institutional diversity among democracies. At a high level, you have presidential and parliamentary systems, unitary and federalist systems, and bicameral and unicameral legislatures. Within each distinction there is also an enormous amount of variation that matters. Whether your parliament is elected through single-seat plurality winner districts ("first past the post") or party-list proportional representation, for example. Whether your bicameral legislature's upper chamber is symmetric authority to its lower chamber. And so on.

It should come as no surprise that non-democracies are at least as diverse, despite our tendency to talk about them as though they are all one thing.

In the above video, I talk about some—and only some—of the key distinctions among non-democracies, and compare them to two sorts of democracies in terms of two dimensions: how difficult it is to establish a regime in the first place and how hard it is to maintain it once you have it.

I encourage you to watch the video, but paid subscribers can also continue reading to drill deeper.