Among the categories of political science, one of the central places is occupied by the concept of political regime. Before considering the content of this category, one caveat should be made, without which the clarification of the essence of the political regime would be erroneous and scientifically unfounded.
The fact is that the political regime is organically connected with such an important category of political science as the political system. In the framework of everyday thinking, in journalism and other pseudoscientific interpretations, a certain stereotype of understanding the political regime as something that has a clearly evaluative character has developed. That is, if they talk about something positive in political reality, for example, about a political system that needs to be presented to the reader (listener) positively, as a rule, they use the concept of a political system in a context.
And another approach, when describing political realities with a given negative attitude, the category of political regime is used. This view is completely erroneous; it has nothing to do with the scientific approach to political science analysis. The fact is that modern political science interprets the political system in two ways. In the framework of one of them, the political system is a really existing mechanism for the exercise of power in a particular state, at one or another level.
In accordance with generally accepted signs, political systems are classified, and one of the most common classifications is the allocation of a democratic type of political system, authoritarian and totalitarian. Throughout its existence, the political system can be in various states, that is, be more democratic or acquire features of an authoritarian-totalitarian type. So, it is precisely this specific state of the political system of a particular state in a particular historical period that characterizes the category - the political regime. Moreover, it does not bear any estimated burdens, but only fixes the state of the political system of a given society at a particular moment in time. For example, for a long time we lived within the framework of the Soviet political system, which was practically unchanged throughout our historical time. However, depending on who was in power and what kind of political atmosphere was forming in society, we distinguished the “thaw” regime (N. Khrushchev, the Stalinist regime, the regime of stagnation (L. Brezhnev), the regime of perestroika (M. Gorbachev).
Based on this approach, the regime acts as a derivative of the political system and is understood as a specific set of specific parameters of the political, ideological, economic and social structures that ensure the exercise of power in a given society at a given time.
During the formation of modern political knowledge, a fairly adequate and, to some extent, universal list of criteria has been formed by which the classification of political regimes is carried out. However, the key principle in classifying a particular regime is the understanding that it reflects the properties of a political system, and therefore the same type allocation techniques that are used in classifying political systems can and should be applied to it.
The main modern political regimes are classified on the basis of such criteria as the measure of exercising power, the methods of recruiting power, the nature of the interactions of power and society, the properties of prohibitions that exist in society, the role of ideology, the type of political leadership, the role of parties, the place of suppressive organs in the government system and others. In accordance with these criteria, it is most commonly accepted to divide political regimes into democratic, totalitarian and authoritarian ones. It should be borne in mind that there is practically no political system that would exist in a “pure form”, that is, possess the characteristics of any one type of regime. As a rule, all the regimes existing in political reality are integrative in nature and combine signs of different types.