Transitional Justice of Prosecutorial Strategies and the Cruelty of Autocrats

• In Event: The Legacy of Authoritarian Repression

Abstract

We model the relationship between criminal transitional justice strategies and atrocities towards low and high-reanking agents of repression on the one hand and robustness of democracy on the other. Our theory builds on Tyson (2018) but models directly the implications of prosecutions for anti-democratic backlash in the form of coups. We show that targeting low-ranking agents of repression increases their incentives for backing coup leaders, We test its predictions with an original dataset of transitional justice prosecutions and the rank of defendants. Specifically, we produce an independent variable for prosecutorial strategy---skewness of justice---based on the newly collected data from the Global Transitional Justice Dataset. These datasets allow us to extract the proportion of leaders that stood trial as a percentage of all criminal trials against former perpetrators.

Authors

• Genevieve Bates, University of British Columbia

• Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago