Legacies of Communism, Imperialism, and Authoritarianism: Commonalities and Divergences

A profusion of recent research has focused on historical legacies as a key to understanding contemporary outcomes. We review this body of research, analyzing both the comparative-historical analysis (CHA) and modern political economy (MPE) research traditions as they have been applied to the study of communism, imperialism, and authoritarianism. We restrict our focus to the sizeable and prominent subset of legacies arguments that meets a relatively strict definition of legacies---those that locate the roots of present-day outcomes in causal factors operative during an extinct political order. For all their methodological differences, the CHA and MPE approaches both face the challenges of convincingly identifying the sources of historical persistence and of reckoning with alternative channels of causation. We find that mechanisms of persistence in legacies research generally belong to one of three main categories. While both traditions acknowledge the role of institutions in historical persistence, CHA research tends to emphasize the lasting power of coalitions, while work in MPE often argues for the persistence of cognitions such as social norms and shared beliefs. We argue that further progress in legacy research will require greater cross-fertilization across research traditions and deeper recognition of commonalities across communist, imperialist, and authoritarian regimes.