The Legacy of Authoritarian Repression

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel is composed of four papers that examine the effects of repression under dictatorship, using a variety of methods and cases under study. In distinct ways, the papers examine how repression affects individuals’ identities, their political beliefs and attitudes, and ultimately, their demands from the political system. Using innovative multigenerational surveys in Cambodia and Guatemala, Lupu and Peisakhin most directly examine the effect of repression on identity. Repression forges feelings of victimhood which reinforces attachment to one’s ethnic, racial, or religious group which, in turn, influences political participation. Voytas and Edwards et al. adopt a similar starting point: that past experience with repression affects individuals’ political attitudes and participation in the new regime. But both papers assess how different forms of transitional justice might “fix” the past. In the context of Chile, Voytas investigates whether material reparations increase political participation among victims of Pinochet’s regime while Edwards et al. explores whether the criminal prosecution of former perpetrators of repression influences institutional trust and human rights norms in Argentina. Adopting a global approach, Nalepa also looks at the effects of different forms of transitional justice, but on political elites. She investigates how purges and truth revelation mechanisms affect elite incentives to shirk their responsibilities towards voters: in the form of corruption and policy congruence. The papers provide a coherent basis by which we can better understand how authoritarian repression has long-lasting effects on political attitudes and behavior, and how citizens and elites in new democracies try to cope with them.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Fixing the Past: The Effects of Human Rights Trials on Political Attitudes - Jennifer Gandhi, Emory University; Don S Grasse; Pearce Edwards, Carnegie Mellon University

• Transitional Justice of Prosecutorial Strategies and the Cruelty of Autocrats - Genevieve Bates, University of British Columbia; Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago

• What Can Money Buy? The Political Consequences of Material Reparations - Elsa Voytas, Princeton University

• Community Elites and Formation of Political Identities: Evidence from Nazi-era Repression of Catholic Priests - Leonid V. Peisakhin, New York University - Abu Dhabi; Didac Queralt, Yale University

Chair

• Yuhua Wang Harvard University

Discussants

• Milena Ang Collan Granillo UT - San Antonio

• Yuhua Wang Harvard University