Monika Nalepa - Identifying the Causal Effect of Truth Revelation Procedures on the Quality of Democratic Representation
Monika Nalepa, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
Does transitional justice hinder or help democracy? This is a question hard to address methodologically because countries embarking on transitional justice may be the same ones that would have had a successful pathway to democratization. Hence the problem of identifying the causal relationship between transitional justice and quality of democracy. To resolve it, we leverage one of the problems associated with coding transitional justice events. In 2016 that Onur Bakiner criticized one of the leading assumptions in the transitional justice literature: that mechanisms for dealing with the past can be assigned a discrete implementation date. This assumption is unwarranted because scholars have difficulty assigning a fixed year of implementation. To take truth commission as an example, qualitative research associates two to four years for the operation of truth commissions (Bakiner 2016). We address the criticism by organizing data on all truth revelation procedures (truth commissions and lustrations) as a time series of events. Not only is this more accurate/faithful to the process on the ground, but it allows us to implement a diff-in-diff research design to identify the casual effect of truth revelation procedures to the quality of democracy. We use quality of democracy indicators from V-Dem and merge them with our Global Transitional Justice Dataset to find convincing evidence that truth revelation procedures and truth commissions in particular, decrease the level of political corruption and help decrease the influence of former authoritarian elites.
Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has published her research in Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Studies in Logic and Rhetoric, and Decyzje. Her next book manuscript, Parties Ascendant, examines the development of programmatic parties in new democracies with a special focus on legislative institutions.