Regency: Sovereign Functions, Delegated Authority, and a Six-Type Taxonomy of Interim Rule

Regency—the exercise of sovereign functions by a person or body other than the sovereign—has attracted extensive period- and region-specific scholarship but has not produced a unified comparative typology. Drawing on Chinese institutional history, European constitutional practice, comparative political science on succession and power-sharing, and the recurring pattern by which an external power governs a territory through a preserved native authority rather than replacing it, this paper proposes a six-type taxonomy organized by the regent's source of legitimacy: the ascendant-generation regent (empress dowager, queen mother), whose claim rests on generational seniority over the sovereign; the successional regent (crown prince, heir apparent), whose claim rests on designated succession; the dynastic regent (imperial or royal prince), whose claim rests on proximity to the ruling house; the ministerial regent (grand councillor, chancellor, protector), whose claim rests on express delegation by the sovereign; the informal regent or power-holder, who lacks formal authority but captures de facto control of sovereign functions; and the exogenous regent, an actor external to the polity altogether, who holds real power and ultimate veto while governing through, rather than replacing, a native legitimacy source it does not itself possess. The paper further proposes two analytical axes—formal authority versus de facto power, and temporary delegation versus institutionalized co-rule—together with six cross-cutting variables (formal heir status, regency mechanism, functional control, coercive capacity, elite recognition, and legal-ritual legitimacy). Their central claim, that formal heir status does not by itself guarantee functional sovereign control, is close to definitional once the two are held apart; the paper's contribution is the typology and the outcome pathways the claim organizes, tested against a demonstration corpus of thirteen historical succession crises across five pathways, two reversible variants, and one boundary case, spanning Qin, Tang, Liu Song, and Ming China, Nicaean Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, England, Scotland, Ethiopia, and Russia, with Japan, Vietnam, Nigeria, and contemporary Saudi Arabia and Bosnia entering through the sixth type and a closing live case. The Targaryen interregnum of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is read against that corpus, as a synthetic case occupying three of its pathways at once, rather than as the paper's sole test.