Collapsed, occupied, and transitional states resist clean classification as regime types.

Evidence

There is a debate in the literature on democracy about how to code or not code certain situations. For example, if the central government has completely collapsed (i.e., anarchy), can one code regime type? If the country is under foreign occupation, can one code regime type? What about transitional periods? Practice with the Polity data set of democracy has varied over time regarding these problematic situations. It is not so obvious what to do. For example, a country under foreign occupation has a government; it is not a democracy. Polity historically coded these cases as missing, and now many code these cases in the gray zone as competitive–authoritarian regimes (i.e., 0 on the − 10 to 10 Polity democracy scale). — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to prior highlights on how colonial and imperial administrative forms straddle categories no taxonomy accommodates — e.g. Egyptian Sudan as neither colony nor integral territory.
• QUESTION: How did Polity’s coding rule for occupied states shift over time, and did the change chase events or methodological fashion?