
A dictatorship is a form of government characterized by a single leader or group of leaders and little or no toleration for political pluralism or independent media. According to other definitions, democracies are a form of government in which "those who govern are selected through periodically contested elections "; therefore, dictatorships are "not democracies,.".

A dictator is a political leader who possesses absolute power. A dictatorship is a state ruled by one dictator or by a small clique. The word originated as the title of a magistrate in the Roman Republic appointed by the Senate to rule the republic in times of emergency.

Autocracy is a system of government in which supreme power over a state is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control.

A caudillo is a type of personalist leader wielding military and political power. There is no precise definition of caudillo, which is often used interchangeably with "warlord" and "strongman." The term is historically associated with Spain, and with Hispanic America after virtually all of that region won independence in the early nineteenth century.

A "conjugal dictatorship" is the unofficial phrase which is used to denote the rule of Philippine president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda and it is also used to describe a type of family dictatorship. It originated in a book titled The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos by Primitivo Mijares that was written in 1976 within a decade after the proclamation of martial law.

A cult of personality, or cult of the leader, arises when a country's regime uses the techniques of mass media, propaganda, the big lie, spectacle, the arts, patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies to create an idealized, heroic, image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis, except that it is established by modern social engineering techniques, usually by the state or the party in one-party states and dominant-party states. It is often seen in totalitarian or authoritarian countries.

Democracy-Dictatorship (DD), index of democracy and dictatorship or simply the DD index or the DD datasets refers to the binary measure of democracy and dictatorship first proposed by Adam Przeworski et al. (2010), and further developed and maintained by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2009). Though the most recent data set is only updated for 2008, there is planning by Cheibub to update it to the present year.

The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship, and writing. Moreover, a dictator novel often is an allegory for the role of the writer in a Latin American society. Although mostly associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, the dictator-novel genre has its roots in the nineteenth-century non-fiction work Facundo (1845), by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. As an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas's dictatorial régime in Argentina, Facundo is the forerunner of the dictator novel genre; all subsequent dictator novels hearken back to it. As established by Sarmiento, the goal of the genre is not to analyze the rule of particular dictators, or to focus on historical accuracy, but to examine the abstract nature of authority figures and of authority in general.

In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a state of affairs in which the proletariat holds political power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, compels the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party, and instituting elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalise ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership. During this phase, the administrative organizational structure of the party is to be largely determined by the need for it to govern firmly and wield state power to prevent counterrevolution and to facilitate the transition to a lasting communist society. Other terms commonly used to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat include socialist state, proletarian state, democratic proletarian state, revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.

Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy, which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries. Opposed to liberalism, democracy, Marxism, and anarchism, fascism is placed on the far right within the traditional left–right spectrum.

Gödel's Loophole is an "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gödel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gödel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gödel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."

The Hungarian Soviet Republic, literally the Republic of Councils in Hungary, also known as the Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in Hungary was a short-lived communist rump state. When the Republic of Councils in Hungary was established in 1919, it controlled approximately 23% of the territory of Hungary's classic pre-World War I territories.

A Caudillo is part of the larger Iberian tradition of authoritarian leaders, with roots in the Iberian past, particularly in the Reconquista. A number of military leaders who were part of the Spanish American struggle for independence took on political roles in during the establishment of new sovereign nation-states. The establishment of military strong men as the head of new national governments did not generally come via elections, but many did have strong popular support. Caudillos often have a personalist connection with their popular followers, combining charisma and machismo ("manliness"), access to political and economic power. They often desire to legitimize their rule. Many caudillos brought order to their areas of control, but also resorted to violence with their armed supporters to achieve it. The early nineteenth century has been considered the "Age of Caudillos," but authoritarian regimes existed in the twentieth century as well, with caudillismo casting a long shadow.
A state of emergency or emergency powers is a situation in which a government is empowered to be able to put through policies that it would normally not be permitted to do, for the safety and protection of their citizens. A government can declare such a state during a natural disaster, civil unrest, armed conflict, medical pandemic or epidemic or other biosecurity risk. Justitium is its equivalent in Roman law—a concept in which the Roman Senate could put forward a final decree that was not subject to dispute yet helped save lives in times of strife.

A tyrant, in the modern English usage of the word, is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law, or one who has usurped a legitimate ruler's sovereignty. Often portrayed as cruel, tyrants may defend their positions by resorting to repressive means. The original Greek term meant an absolute sovereign who came to power without constitutional right, yet the word had a neutral connotation during the Archaic and early Classical periods. However, Greek philosopher Plato saw tyrannos as a negative word, and on account of the decisive influence of philosophy on politics, its negative connotations only increased, continuing into the Hellenistic period.