The Missing Regimes: Why Colonial Rule Must Be Coded as Regime Type

Comparative regime research faces a foundational problem: virtually all global regime datasets exclude colonial territories entirely or code them as missing data. V-Dem, Polity, Freedom House, and other standard resources provide no regime classifications for colonies, treating imperial governance as something categorically different from "real" regimes. This exclusion is not merely a data gap but represents a theoretical mis-specification with profound consequences for our understanding of regime trajectories, institutional persistence, and political development. Colonial rule was not the absence of a regime but a specific regime type with identifiable characteristics: monopolized political power, restricted participation, and institutionalized hierarchies based on imperial sovereignty. By excluding colonial regimes from classification, existing research treats decolonization as state birth rather than regime transition, obscuring the institutional continuities and path dependencies that shaped postcolonial development. This paper presents the first systematic analysis treating colonial governance as regime variation. Using the Varieties of Political Regimes (Va-PoReg) dataset (the only global resource coding colonial regimes from 1900 onward), I disaggregate colonial governance into direct rule and indirect rule configurations. These functioned as distinct institutional templates with specific implications for state-society relations, legitimacy structures, and administrative capacity. The analysis employs sequence analysis and comparative case methods to trace regime trajectories from colonial governance through postcolonial transitions. When colonial regimes are included rather than excluded, postcolonial regime trajectories become comprehensible as path-dependent transitions rather than random outcomes. Preliminary analysis reveals systematic variation between direct and indirect rule: direct rule colonies exhibit distinctive patterns of centralized autocratic consolidation, while indirect rule territories show higher rates of persistent institutional hybridity due to preserved traditional authority structures. These patterns (and the mechanisms linking colonial templates to postcolonial outcomes) are invisible when colonialism is treated as missing data. The paper demonstrates that the systematic exclusion of colonial regimes from comparative regime research has generated a cascade of analytical problems: truncated historical analysis, mis-specified causal models, and inability to explain postcolonial regime patterns. Including colonial regimes as regimes transforms our understanding of democratization, autocratization, and institutional persistence across more than a century of political development.