La otra cara de las urnas: elecciones, dictaduras y Guerra Fría en Europa. Propuesta para un marco conceptual

This article is about elections in dictatorial contexts, an issue that historians have not played special attention and where the main works are from the field of political science or have borrowed their theoretical and methodological framework from it. Keeping in mind this theoretical background, recognizing their failures and successes, the following work aims to sketch the first lines of a conceptual framework that allows us to analyze the electoral processes in elections in post WWII European dictatorships from a historical and transnational perspective. For this, I suggest the concept of institutionalizing elections and set both its historical time frame as its main formal characteristics. Finally, in order to provide the concept of historicity, the text analyzes the functions which these elections fulfilled in Europe along the Cold War as well as their impact on political regimes that hold them.