Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: When the Agent Becomes the Boss:The Politics of Public Employment in Argentina and Turkey

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This Doctoral Dissertation Research addresses two related problems, arising in new democracies. First, why do political elites who are successors of the authoritarian regime sponsor institutions involving transitional justice, when such institutions may implicate them? Second, given a decision to engage in transitional justice, which variant of institutions designed for revealing truth about past human rights violations better fulfills two normative criteria suggested by the literature: reaching as many perpetrators and prosecuting as few innocent as possible? 1) Intellectual merit of proposed activity: The contribution of the dissertation to the comparative politics of democratic transitions consists in initiating the application of game theory and formal institutional analysis to transitional justice phenomena. It will also result in one of the first applications of quantitative methods to the field of transitional justice. Funding form the NSF would make possible the creation of the first time-series/cross sectional dataset of transitional justice events and a dataset with the results of a survey on attitudes to transitional justice the only survey of this type to be conducted, so far, in a post-communist country. The data generated by the survey experiment would allow to draw interesting comparisons on the operation of truth commissions and screening laws in post-communist and post-Apartheid societies. 2) Broader impact of proposed research: Although the proposed research will be carried out in Eastern Europe, the theoretical results it builds on may well be applied to other democratizing states, in particular to Latin America. The expected findings of this dissertation are critical to understanding both the consolidation of new democracies and the reconciliation process between citizens who sided with the authoritarian regime and those who opposed it. Analyzing procedures of coming to terms with the past and analyzing the way their rules interact and shape incentives of voters and politicians is essential for preventing new democracies from falling back into authoritarian traps.