The Political Regimes Project is a comprehensive effort to study the determinants and comparative performance of political regimes. The main goal of the project is to assemble and analyze a large cross-national dataset containing indicators of the three basic political regime types (democracy, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism) and a variety of politcal regime subtypes (e.g., parliamentary democracy, bureaucratic authoritarianism). This dataset will contain yearly measures of political regime type and subtype for 117 major countries from 1946 (or a country's first full year of independence) through 1988. The author plans to use this dataset as the basis for a comprehensive study of the determinants and performance of political regimes, and will eventually make the dataset available to other researchers. The comprehensive scope of the Political Regimes Database, its time series properties, and the elaborate typology of regimes that it is based upon will enable researchers to examine political regimes in novel ways that may yield valuable new insights.