Where does regime collide?

The set of formal and informal rules and institutions that determine how political power is acquired, held, and exercised within a state: a regime is more durable than any single government yet distinct from the state itself, and it is classified into types such as democracy, single-party, military, or personalist rule. Geddes, Wright, and Frantz's 2014 Autocratic breakdown and regime transitions coded the leadership-selection rules of authoritarian cases to build a typology and track how one regime type gives way to another. The referent is an institutional order inside a polity, coded by its rules for choosing and constraining leaders, not a bargain among states, a state of moving fluid, or a hidden statistical state.[1]

Unit

A regime type, a categorical classification of a polity's power rules

Recovery means

Not applicable; a regime does not relax to a baseline but persists, breaks down, or transitions to another type

Measured by

Classified by coding a polity's institutions and leadership-selection rules into regime types such as democracy, single-party, military, or personalist rule

The principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area of world politics: an international regime governs cooperation among states even without a central authority, and it functions as an intervening variable between underlying power and observed outcomes. Krasner's 1982 Structural causes and regime consequences set out this definition and weighed how far such regimes independently shape state behaviour. The referent is a shared normative and procedural framework among actors in an issue-area, not the internal power rules of one state, a physical flow, or a latent model state.[2]

Unit

A regime, described qualitatively by its principles, norms, rules, and procedures

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed qualitatively by identifying the principles, norms, rules, and procedures actors observe in an issue-area, and whether expectations converge around them

The qualitative state of a moving fluid, chiefly whether the motion is laminar, transitional, or turbulent: the regime is set by the balance of inertial to viscous forces, captured by the dimensionless Reynolds number, with an abrupt change of character above a critical value. Reynolds's 1883 An experimental investigation of the circumstances which determine whether the motion of water shall be direct or sinuous traced dye in pipe flow and identified the parameter that fixes when direct motion becomes sinuous. The referent is a physical state of a flow, indexed by a force ratio, and it has nothing to do with the rules of a polity, a bargain among states, or a statistical latent state.[3]

Unit

A flow state, laminar or turbulent, indexed by the Reynolds number

Recovery means

A disturbed laminar flow can relaminarize when the Reynolds number falls below the critical value; above it, turbulence is sustained

Measured by

Determined by the dimensionless Reynolds number, the ratio of inertial to viscous forces, with transition near a critical value observed as dye breaks from a straight thread into swirls

In a regime-switching model, a discrete unobserved state that governs the parameters of a time-series process, so that the data are generated by different laws depending on which regime is currently active: the states are hidden and their evolution is typically modelled as a Markov chain with fixed transition probabilities. Hamilton's 1989 A new approach to the economic analysis of nonstationary time series and the business cycle let autoregressive parameters depend on such a latent state to capture shifts between expansion and recession. The referent is an inferred statistical state estimated by likelihood, not an institutional order, an interstate framework, or a physical flow.[4]

Unit

A latent state governing model parameters, with estimated transition probabilities

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated from a time series by maximum likelihood, inferring the filtered probability of each latent regime and the transition probabilities between them

In transition studies, regime refers to a sociotechnical regime, the shared rules, practices and infrastructures that stabilize an existing technological system, in the multi-level perspective. This meaning comes from Geels (2002) in Research Policy.[5]

Unit

Recovery means

Measured by