Prewar party strength does not reliably predict postwar strategy

Evidence

On the one hand, the Czech party’s pre-1926 domestic support should have led the party to accept greater pluralism and reform efforts in the communist period, since the party felt assured of greater support. On the other, its weakness after 1926 should have led the party to reject free elections in 1946. That neither happened suggests that past patterns of bourgeois-socialist cleavages and representation were neither sustained, nor did they inform postwar strategy. In short, the continuities between the preand postwar regimes were neither as consistent nor as systematically persistent as the postwar patterns. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s skepticism about legacies being read backward from outcomes; relevant methodologically to the question of whether communism’s collapse reveals manufactured rather than primordial bases of solidarity. — connects to: War outcomes are unpredictable from force composition comparisons — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2593

Broader Connections

• War outcomes are unpredictable from force composition comparisons #corroborates (0.82) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2593