After Authoritarianism

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel will bring together scholars of political economy, judiciary politics, authoritarianism, democratic transitions, and human rights to discuss Monika Nalepa's book "After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability." The book uses formal theory to reconstruct mechanisms of transitional justice and uses methods of political economy to draw implications from the models. A brief description of its contents is provided below.

Transitional Justice--that is--the act of reckoning with a former authoritarian regime after it has ceased to exist has direct implications for democratic processes. It influences who decides to go into politics, shapes politicians' behavior while in office, and finally, influences how politicians delegate policy decisions. Mechanisms of transitional justice, far from being the epilogue of an outgoing authoritarian regime, are thus a constitutive part of the new democratic order. How successful democracies become at remaining democratic and the overall quality of these democracies is a direct consequence of transitional justice. Within transitional justice, this book distinguishes between transparency mechanisms---the revelation of authoritarian legacies that were concealed---and purges---the firing of open collaborators of the ancien regime. Analysis of this distinction throws into stark relief the contrasting effects these mechanisms have on sustaining and shaping the quality of democratic processes. While transparency regimes unequivocally reduce corruption and improve the programmatic representation political parties can offer, the effect of purges is more ambiguous and contingent on features of the former authoritarian regime and current circumstances. At the same time, not all new states are equally well-positioned to carry out purges in the first place. Hence, the availability of transitional justice as a remedy is not uniform. A highly disaggregated global transitional justice dataset allows readers to evaluate these theoretical claims and confirms that the choice between democracy and justice that scholars have for decades presented to newly transitioned societies is misconstrued.

Sub Unit

• Division 4: Formal Political Theory

Chair

• Anne Meng University of Virginia

Presenters

• Kelebogile Zvobgo College of William & Mary

• Anna M. Grzymala-Busse Stanford University

• Daniel M. Brinks University of Texas at Austin

• Josef Woldense University of Minnesota, Twin Cities