Chapter 1: Introduction: Towards a Multipolar History of Democracy; Ana Kladnik -- Part I. Between No-, One- and Multi-party Democracy -- Chapter 2: One too Many? Chinese Perspectives on Multiparty Politics; Henrike Rudolph -- Chapter 3: Submissive Helpers of the Socialist Unity Party? The Role and Function of Bloc Parties in the Multiparty System of the German Democratic Republic up to 1989/90 and Changes in Tasks of the Democratic Farmers’ Party of Germany; Theresia Bauer -- Chapter 4: Socialist Self-Management: The Constitutional Vision of Democracy in Yugoslavia; Pavle Antonijević -- Chapter 5: Visions of Democracy and the Union Government Referendum: New Perspectives on Military Rule in Ghana, 1972-1978; Ryan Colton -- Part II. Democracy from Above and Below -- Chapter 6: “Not bourgeois democracy, but replacing this democracy with proletarian class rule”: The Communist Women’s Movement’s Vision of Democracy in the Early 1920s; Daria Dyakonova -- Chapter 7: ‘Cooperation, not Competition’: Democracy and Participation in Revolutionary Cuba; Helen Yaffe -- Chapter 8: Assessing Socialist Democracy in Vietnam; Michael Karadjis -- Chapter 9: Socialist Democracy in Yugoslav Municipalities and Local Communities, 1970s and 1980s; Igor Duda and Ana Kladnik -- Part III. Industrial Democracy -- Chapter 10: Practising People’s Democracy in a Small Polish Town: Communists and Socialists in Żyrardów, 1945–1947; Jan A. Burek -- Chapter 11: Forms of Democracy and Socialist Self-management in Czechoslovak Industry, 1945–1969; Jakub Šlouf -- Chapter 12: The Limits of Democracy: Labour Movement, Taken Factories, and the Popular Unity Government (Chile, 1970–1973); Luis H. Thielemann -- Chapter 13: Socialist Democracy in Yugoslavia: Female Workers’ Participation on the Shop Floor; Floor Nina Vidopivec -- Chapter 14: Industrial Participatory Democracy: A ‘Paper Tiger’ of the Zambian One-party State and its Transnational Entanglements; Goran Musić and Immanuel R. Harisch.

Open Access

This open access book explores how socialist and post-colonial states envisioned and practised democracy for themselves after the Second World War. While scholarship on democracy has tended to focus on Western political traditions, this book demonstrates that the alternatives to liberal parliamentary democracy were not only widely debated in the countries of the ‘second’ and ‘third’ world, but also put into practice. Contributing to a fertile area of research, this edited collection explores what democracy meant in socialist and post-colonial countries. The chapters focus on the period following the Second World War, when beliefs about democracy included the notion that popular sovereignty should extend beyond the nation-state, that social justice should be enhanced, and that working people were the true bearers of sovereignty. The thirteen chapters in this volume, written by an international team of scholars, examine countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and adopt a wide array of methods, ranging from political and social history, social anthropology, and the history of political thought, in order to explore how various meanings and practices of democracy have shaped historical experiences and political order. Ana Kladnik is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. Previously she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Graz, Austria, from 2023-2025. Her research examines modern European history, with a focus on the political and social transformation of the twentieth century. In previous years, Ana worked at the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague, the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, the Technical University in Dresden, and the Institute for Contemporary History in Ljubljana. She was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Liverpool. Ana is a co-editor of Making Sense of Dictatorship. Domination and Everyday Life in East Central Europe after 1945 (2022).

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