Coming to terms with the past. A framework for the study of justice in the transition to democracy

Abstract

After the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime, one commonly observes trials of the agents of the former regime and efforts to compensate its victims. In our century, waves of transitional justice have occured in German-occupied countries after 1941, in South- Eastern Europe in the 1970s, in Latin-American countries in the 1980s, and in post-Communist countries after 1989. The article proposes a framework for the behavioral study of these phenomena. The dependent variables are political decisions to pursue retroactive justice after the transition. Independent variables include the constraints of the actors, their motivations and beliefs, as well as the mechanisms by which individual policy preferences are aggregated into binding collective decisions.