Hegemony, Heterogeneity, History: Varieties of Communism in Theory and Practice

Communism has proven to be a profoundly but not perfectly homogenizing force across a highly heterogeneous set of countries. This article offers a minimalist definition of communist regimes as those where a party-state claims a tripartite monopoly over politics, the economy, and society. After tracing the conceptual history of communism in comparative politics and reviewing the global trajectories of communist regimes throughout their Cold War heyday, we argue that variation in how the three monopolies have been executed and enforced offers the most helpful lens for studying how communist regimes have differed both from their non-communist counterparts and from each other. In their historical trajectories, communist regimes have varied based on: (1) incomplete convergence in regime origins, (2) increasing divergence in regime evolutions, and (3) chronic informality in regime practices. Understanding how the communist world has varied is inextricably tied to understanding when it has varied.