What Do We Know about Interwar Regime Changes? Established Findings and Neglected Issues

Interwar patterns of regime change in Europe have attracted much interest by social scientists. In this paper, we review this literature to assess which explanations have received more empirical support and to identify interesting patterns which are not sufficiently accounted for. While a number of the explanations proposed in the literature have serious shortcomings, most of the general variation in democratic survival co-varies with a set of deeper variables – especially pre-WWI legacy of political competition (including party institutionalization) and the level of socio-economic development. However, we also note that the comparative literature has tended to only address whether democracies broke down or not rather than nuanced patterns of democratic regression across the different components of democracy. Moreover, comparisons with democratic developments in other regions of the world, such as Latin America, are in short supply for this period. We enlist new data from the Varieties of Democracy project that allow us to shed new light on these issues.