Post-Authoritarian Purges: Testing the Implications of a Formal Model

• In Event: The Political Economy of Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

In an era of democratic backsliding (Bermeo 2016, Lust & Waldner 2015, Serra 2012, Luo and Przeworski 2018, Svolik 2018), getting transitional Justice (TJ) right cannot be overstated. When fragile new democracies are at risk of reverting back to dictatorship, the question arises: Can mechanisms set up by new democracies to deal with former authoritarian elites – prevent such backsliding from happening? Or is backsliding occurring despite extensive TJ provisions? To date, scholars’ findings about the effects of personnel TJ on democratic consolidation have been ambiguous at best (Olsen, Payne and Ritter 2012). This paper suggests that the reason behind this is the pooling together of two very different vetting mechanisms: lustration, which improves the quality of democracy monotonically, and purges, whose effect is contingent on attributes of the ancient regime. My research recategorizes mechanisms of TJ by drawing a distinction between addressing secret and open collaboration. Access to information about secret collaborators allows authoritarian elites to pressure new democratic elites to implement policies that diverge from voters’ preferences. Hence former authoritarian elites’ influence decreases with the severity of lustration, i.e, the mechanisms used to publicize secret collaborators of the ancient regime. In contrast, the severity of purges can be thought of as the reverse of a delegation problem: the more agents of the former regime are let go, the more new democratic politicians are exposed to policy shocks. The loss of expertise resulting from purges is particularly acute in the case of well institutionalized former authoritarian regimes, wherein members had expertise allowing for better shock absorption.

This paper will formalize the mechanism behind post-authoritarian purges and the quality of democracy, and test the implications of the formal model with a novel dataset extending cross-sectionally to 86 countries and over time (from 1946 to 2018). In doing this, it will also account for mechanisms conflating the effect of purges: criminal trials. When former regime members face criminal prosecutions, they are effectively purged. Hence any investigation of the effect of post-authoritarian purges must also account for criminal trials. Empirical analysis corroborates results from the formal model.

Authors

• Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago

• Genevieve Bates, University of Chicago

• Ipek Cinar, University of Chicago

• Evgenia Olimpieva, University of Chicago