Subtype talk obscures that only a dimension’s 0 or 1 coding changes.

Evidence

The whole terminology of “diminished subtype” is quite misleading. The member of defining dimensions remains the same in all of the circumstances: what is changing is whether a given dimension is coded 0 or 1. So one might call these different kinds of democracies, but the notion of subtype is really not very useful. It distracts from descriptive and causal analyses. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 1486

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies why ‘diminished subtype’ misleads: the set of defining dimensions never changes, only their coding.