Authoritarian Elites under Democracy

• In Event: Authoritarian Elites

Abstract

What happens to authoritarian elites when the regime dies?
We study the fate of former authoritarian elites and conceptualize it as de facto transitional justice. We track the futures of ruling elites, from 71 former authoritarian states, during the time period of 1946 to 2016 and begin by disaggregating their post-authoritarian careers into four categories: state administration, political parties, military, and business. We then calculate the proportions of former elites in each of these categories, use these proportions as indices of de facto transitional justice, and relate it to what we call de jure transitional justice. The Global Transitional Justice Dataset, which codes actual transitional justice legislation, divides de jure transitional justice into three categories: lustration, truth commission, and purges. Our goal in this paper is to uncover the ways in which these indices of de facto transitional justice are predicted by de jure transitional justice. In other words, we explore the relationship between specific transitional justice mechanisms and future prospects of former authoritarian elites.

Author

• Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago