It depends on what is meant by "democracy" and "autocracy". This, I think, is the chief philosophical puzzle - perhaps the intellectual Grand Prix of our times. For example, in reading your essay I couldn't avoid the thought that every "democracy" I can think of has many non-"democratic" features. As Barbora Capinska wrote so very well in her PhD thesis, "liberal democracies" are inherently authoritarian and coercive (Ramin Jahanbegloo has been saying this for a long time as well). So too for the "autocracies" in mind. Each that I can think of has features that are "democratic". Baogang He has detailed local democratic actions in mainland China, for example. The level of participation by citizens/residents there puts many "sleepy/decadent citizenries" of the "West" to shame. Both concepts are, as a result, inherently blurry and one concept can, depending on the way we're looking at it, be either "democratic" or "non-democratic". This poses, it seems to me at least, a hurdle that typologists should clear else we remain vulnerable to the criticism of cherry picking and wilful ignorance.