Beyond Dictatorship and Democracy: Rethinking National Minority Inclusion and Regime Type in Interwar Eastern Europe

Most standard models of democratization privilege class-based actors and the regimes they prefer to account for patterns of dictatorship and democracy. These models are ill suited, however, to explain political regime change in interwar Eastern Europe, where the dominant cleavage was not class but nationality. As a consequence, neither the process of regime change nor the resulting regime outcomes in Eastern Europe conform to the standard Western European models. Through a detailed analysis of key episodes of regime change in interwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, the authors explore the different ethnic and social coalitions on which political authority was built and the circumstances under which these two countries made the transition from one regime type to another. The depth of the ethnic divide meant that sustaining democracy in Eastern Europe required sidelining the urban 1University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada 2University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Jeffrey S. Kopstein, University of Toronto, Department of Political Science, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto ON, M4V 1A9, Canada Email: [email protected] doi:10.1177/0010414010370437 Comparative Political Studies OnlineFirst, published on May 13, 2010 as