The Authoritarian Ruling Elites Database (ARED) is a collection of biographical and professional information on individuals who make up the elite of authoritarian regimes, typically referred to as the governing or winning coalition. The sample coverage includes regimes identified by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2018) as authoritarian between 1950-2018. There are also several pre-1946 regimes covered that clearly constitute an authoritarian regime. The unit of observation for the dataset is the authoritarian elite, with each row covering a continuous period of an individual within the governing institution that is generally accepted as the regime’s “winning coalition” group. The datasets also include a number of regime identification, professional, and personal biographical variables. This project draws on a vast field of the literature of history, political science/international relations, regional studies, and government/media reports on the regimes. This codebook and the overall ARED project are ongoing, with more datasets to come. You can observe several bibliographic sections for authoritarian regimes that do not have corresponding datasets prepared yet. These are planned expansions. This document includes a codebook of variables and a bibliography of source materials organized by country and period of authoritarian regime. If you have any source information on any missing data highlighted in yellow or red in the datasets, feel free to contact me at: Austin.Matthews@du.edu.