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Can Transitional Justice Improve the Quality of Representation in New Democracies?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2019

Milena Ang  and
Monika Nalepa
Milena Ang
Affiliation:
University of Chicagomilenaang@uchicago.edu
Monika Nalepa
Affiliation:
University of Chicagomnalepa@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

Can transitional justice enhance democratic representation in countries recovering from authoritarian rule? The authors argue that lustration, a policy that reveals secret collaboration with the authoritarian regime, can prevent former authoritarian elites from extorting policy concessions from past collaborators who have been elected as politicians in the new regime. Absent lustration, former elites can threaten to reveal information about past collaboration unless the politicians implement policies these elites desire. In this way, lustration policies enable politicians to avoid blackmail and to be responsive to their constituents, improving the quality of representation. The authors show that whether lustration enhances representation depends on its severity and the extent to which dissidents-turned-politicians would suffer if the skeletons in their closets were revealed. The authors also find that the potential to blackmail politicians increases as the ideological distance between authoritarian elites and politicians decreases. They test this theory with original data from the Global Transitional Justice Dataset, which spans eighty-four countries that transitioned to democracy since 1946.

Keywords

blackmailGlobal Transitional Justice Datasetquality of representationtransitional justice
Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 631 - 666
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2019 

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