At the beginning of this book I posed two competing arguments and identified six research questions. The first argument proposed that the type of regime or political system determined individual state policies toward minorities. The alternative argument suggested that conditions specific to individual countries were responsible for deciding the kind of policies states pursued. The first two of the six research questions I set corresponded to these arguments while the other four pertained to the changes in Romani marginality over time and in response to different state policies, the extent to which the Gypsies have been able to alter their marginality and influence the state, and the ways in which Romani marginality might be alleviated. In this concluding chapter my task is to evaluate the merits of the two arguments and summarize the answers to the research questions in light of the empirical evidence I have marshaled.

REGIMES AND REGIME CHANGE

Regime types and regime change do make a difference but certainly do not determine the minority policies of individual states. As we have seen, there were some similarities in the minority policies of states belonging to the same regime type, but there were also significant differences. I found that the more flexible the parameters of an individual regime type, the larger the variation of specific policies that regime type allows. In other words, the type of political system is the more reliable determinant of minority policies the more constrictive it is and the less pluralism it permits.