Institutionalized autocracy
 "Authoritarian regime" in Western political discourse is a pejorative term for some very diverse kinds of political systems whose common properties are a lack of regularized political competition and concern for political freedoms. The term Autocracy is used and defined operationally in terms of the presence of a distinctive set of political characteristics.  In mature form, autocracies sharply restrict or suppress competitive political participation. Their chief executives are chosen in a regularized process of selection within the political elite, and once in office they exercise power with few institutional constraints. Most modern autocracies also exercise a high degree of directiveness over social and economic activity, but we regard this as a function of political ideology and choice, not a defining property of autocracy. Social democracies also exercise relatively high degrees of directiveness. The Polity data producers prefer to leave open for empirical investigation the question of how Autocracy, Democracy, and directiveness (performance) have covaried over time. 
An eleven-point Autocracy scale is constructed additively.  The logic of this "institutionalized autocracy" scale is similar to that of the institutionalized democracy scale, below, and it is subject to the same kinds of operational redefinition to suit different theoretical purposes. Note that the two scales do not share any categories in common. Nonetheless many polities have mixed authority traits, and thus can have middling scores on both Autocracy and Democracy scales. These are the kinds of polities which were characterized as "anocratic" and "incoherent" in the Polity I studies. As a group they proved to less durable than coherent democracies and autocracies (see Gurr 1974, Harmel 1980, Lichbach 1984).  The Polity IV dataset covers all major, independent states in the global system (i.e., states with total population of 500,000 or more in the most recent year; currently 163 countries) over the period 1800-2009.  Changes made during the most recent update are listed in an Excel file in http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/inscr.htm. For details see Monty G. Marshall, Ted Robert Gurr and Keith Jaggers “POLITY™ IV PROJECT, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2009, Dataset Users’ Manual”
 "Authoritarian regime" in Western political discourse is a pejorative term for some very diverse kinds of political systems whose common properties are a lack of regularized political competition and concern for political freedoms. The term Autocracy is used and defined operationally in terms of the presence of a distinctive set of political characteristics.  In mature form, autocracies sharply restrict or suppress competitive political participation. Their chief executives are chosen in a regularized process of selection within the political elite, and once in office they exercise power with few institutional constraints. Most modern autocracies also exercise a high degree of directiveness over social and economic activity, but we regard this as a function of political ideology and choice, not a defining property of autocracy. Social democracies also exercise relatively high degrees of directiveness. The Polity data producers prefer to leave open for empirical investigation the question of how Autocracy, Democracy, and directiveness (performance) have covaried over time.  An eleven-point Autocracy scale is constructed additively.