Lustration, Purges, and Decommunization: similar, yet different

• In Event: Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Transitional Justice

Abstract

The Transitional Justice (TJ) literature treats lustration, administrative purges and de-communization (or de-baathification, de-nazification, etc.) as essentially the same type of mechanism for dealing with the past, relying on the fact, that they all aim at eliminating from the state apparatus members and collaborators of the previous authoritarian regime. However, the effect that the severity of these mechanisms has on the quality of democracy ensuring following the transition are quite different. This paper makes this argument by drawing to distinctions: between lustration on purges, on the one hand; and between lustration and de-communization (or de-nazification, de-baathicfication, etc.), on the other. The contrast between lustration and purges is exemplified with two game theoretic models: a model of lustration blackmail and a model of purging the security apparatus. It shows that while the quality of political representation increases with the severity of lustration, the opposite is true for the severity of administrative purges.

In the latter part of the paper, I develop an argument according to which the effectiveness of TJ to clear a country’s elites from authoritarian networks depends on the type of communism it is recovering from. Specifically, communist states that relied on clandestine collaborators to stay in power require lustration to clear their political elites of authoritarian networks. Communist states that persisted thanks to open collaboration, such as membership in mass communist parties to stay in power, require decommunization to purge themselves of former communist networks. In the PostCommunist context, the distinction between clandestine and open authoritarian networks partly overlaps with Kitschelt’s distinction between patrimonial communism on the one hand and national accommodative and bureaucratic communism on the other. I test this second line of argument with data from my original Transitional Justice Database and Herbert Kitschelt Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project dataset.

Author

• Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago