Classifying Regimes from Aristotle to Today

To compare governments, scholars sort them into types. Aristotle asked two questions: how many rule (one, few or many), and do they rule for the common good or for themselves? This gave six forms: monarchy and its corruption tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, and 'polity' and its corruption, which he called democracy. Modern political science uses different questions: are leaders chosen in free and competitive elections, are rights protected, and is power limited by law?

This yields broad categories such as liberal democracy, electoral democracy, hybrid regimes and closed autocracies. Classification is useful because it lets us test claims, for example whether democracies go to war with each other less often. But labels can mislead: a country's official name may say 'democratic' or 'republic' when its practice is not, so careful comparison always looks at how power actually works.