The Establishment of Communist Governments: A Comparative-Historical and Quantitative Analysis of Onset Mechanisms Across the Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Global South

Abstract

This dissertation asks how communist governments were established across roughly thirty polities between 1917 and 1979, and why some of the resulting party-states endured for decades while others collapsed within a generation. Its organizing premise is that “communist takeover” is not a single event type but a family of distinct processes—revolutionary seizure followed by civil war, anti-colonial liberation, foreign occupation and sponsored state-building, coalition infiltration and manipulated election, military coup followed by ideological conversion, and incorporation into a multinational Soviet federation. Collapsing these processes into one binary indicator obscures the causal heterogeneity that a comparative science of politics most needs to explain. The study therefore treats the mechanism of establishment as the master variable shaping later party institutionalization and regime survival. The design is mixed-methods and grounded in open, publicly retrievable evidence. It combines qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), discrete-time event-history modeling, and process tracing within three nested paired comparisons—Hungary and Czechoslovakia, China and North Korea, and Angola and Mozambique. The case universe comprises fifteen former Soviet republics, six Eastern European states, five Asian states, and Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Albania. Fourteen public datasets—including Polity5, V-Dem, V-Party, Freedom House, World Bank Open Data, the Penn World Table, the Correlates of War components, SIPRI, UCDP/PRIO, Archigos, and the Powell-Thyne coup data—are harmonized through a unit-history concordance and a multi-date coding of establishment. All six hypotheses (H1–H6) receive graded support. War is a near-necessary condition for durable establishment, present in roughly 85% of durable cases—a set-theoretic result that coverage-limited regression obscured. War-made parties forged through prolonged indigenous armed struggle prove markedly more cohesive than occupation-founded regimes, whose durability is borrowed from a patron: all Soviet-dependent regimes terminated between 1989 and 1992, whereas every surviving communist regime originated in indigenous revolution. Establishments cluster in temporal waves consistent with diffusion through proximity and material support, and the QCA reveals equifinality—multiple non-equivalent pathways to the same outcome. The study contributes a disaggregated typology of onset mechanisms, a replicable open-science evidence base, and a demonstration of how set-theoretic, statistical, and case-based inference can discipline one another.