I forgot that what I was primarily interested in this (and Jay's subsequent work like https://blog.koto.ai/2018/03/12/tenure-track-china-in-comparative-perspective/) was concrete quantitative ways of describing a country's government as autocratic, or how to objectively say when a government "falls".

An art project that someone could do is, a crowdsource app letting visitors vote how long each country that currently "exists" (including Taiwan, Palestine, etc.) will last, for some criterion or 3rd party analysis like http://oefresearch.org/datasets/reign