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Can transitional justice enhance democratic representation in countries recovering from authoritarian rule? We argue that lustration, the policy of revealing secret collaboration with the authoritarian regime, can prevent former authoritarian elites from extorting policy concessions from past collaborators who have become elected politicians. Absent lustration, former elites can threaten to reveal information about past collaboration unless politicians implement policies these elites desire. In this way, lustration laws enable politicians to avoid blackmail and become responsive to their constituents, improving the quality of representation. We show that whether lustration enhances representation depends on its severity and the extent to which dissidents- turned-politicians suffer if their skeletons come out. We also find that the potential to blackmail politicians increases as the ideological distance between authoritarian elites and politicians decreases. We test this theory with original data from the Global Transitional Justice Datast spanning 84 countries that transitioned to democracy since 1946. 

Can a lack of transitional justice contribute to democratic backsliding? This paper uses the case of Poland to argue that selective enforcement of transitional justice can be linked to democratic erosion. In doing so, the paper adjudicates between two theories of democratic backsliding. The first, advanced by Milan Svolik, argues that elite polarization drives erosion: when political candidates are ideologically far apart, citizens who strongly prefer one over the other may turn a blind eye to antidemocratic transgressions by their preferred candidate to prevent the competing candidate from winning. The second theory, presented by Nalepa, Vanberg, and Ciopris (NVC), describes an equilibrium where voters are uncertain whether the candidate they are dealing with is a closet autocrat or an ideological incumbent, but reelect him into office regardless. This theory posits that a closet autocrat is reelected into office because his first period actions are identical to those of an ideological incumbent. I argue that judiciary reforms in Poland reflect exactly the kind of incumbent actions that are consistent both with the actions of an ideological incumbent and with the actions of a closet autocrat. Using survey data from Poland, I find evidence of elite polarization, offering support for the first theory, but also find ample evidence of polarization in the electorate and of a belief structure supportive of the equilibrium from NVC. I present Hungary’s experience with transitional justice and the rule of law as a shadow case to illustrate similar dynamics to those taking place in Poland. 

In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project.