In After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability, Nalepa examines the impact of transitional justice measures on the quality of democracy in postauthoritarian states. Focusing on personnel reforms as transitional justice mechanisms, this book explores the conditions under which truth commissions, lustration measures, and purges support the quality of democracy across a global range of cases. The central research question investigates whether states that uncover secret collaboration related to their authoritarian pasts are better able to support democracy than states that do not. A series of second-order questions explore if and why truth-revelatory mechanisms exposing unknown collaboration from the previous regime affect the quality of democracy differently than the removal of already known collaborators and agents. Nalepa engages these questions using a methodologically impressive array of formal models, quantitative analyses, time series considerations, GIS mapping, and country case vignettes.
The key difference for Nalepa is the way a state approaches personnel reforms with respect to previously known collaboration versus unknown collaboration. She describes purges as the removal of individuals from positions of power who were known collaborators (either narrow “leadership purges” or more societally broad “thorough purges”), while lustration describes the revelation of previously unknown collaboration. Building on insights from her award-winning book Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (2010), Nalepa argues that it is more important to expose nonprofessional agents and collaborators who worked in secret than to purge the state of open members and administrators of the former regime. Revealing the “secret” nature of collaboration affects voter choice and political elite behavior in a manner supporting democracy and differently from revelations of already known collaboration. The formal models rest on the assumption that the threat of blackmail over secret collaboration encourages political elites to recuse themselves from political positions lest their past be revealed to the public (chap. 2). Voters play an important role in preventing individuals with revealed compromised pasts from taking political office.
Using her original Global Transitional Justice Database (GTJD), Nalepa employs an array of sophisticated quantitative analyses and innovative proxy variables to test the hypothesized difference between punishing known collaboration (purges) and revealing unknown collaboration (lustration) on the quality of democracy. Defining improvements in the quality of democracy as decreases in political corruption and/or a decrease in the political power of former elites, she finds that while truth-revelatory measures like truth commissions and lustration are generally supportive, purges can undermine the quality of democracy depending on the context. To address the main research question, “letting sleeping dogs lie, particularly when it comes to yet-to-be-revealed crimes perpetrated by former autocrats, is exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with the past” (p. 29).
Findings related to the series of second-order questions are nuanced, reflecting the granularity of the GTJD personnel reform measures and the variety of research methods employed. While truth commissions are strongly associated with less political corruption and a decrease in the political power of former authoritarian elites, lustration’s impact is more mixed with model specification affecting the positive, neutral, and even negative effects (p. 192). Purges affect countries with low versus high government capacity differently, with noted variation in the impact of leadership and thorough purges. Nalepa argues lustration disincentivizes former collaborators from running for political office, while purges can undermine new democracies by denuding bureaucratic capacity in already low-capacity environments.
There is much to consider in this complexly argued and methodologically sophisticated book. Some of the findings reinforce scholarship demonstrating the positive impact of lustration on democracy and against corruption in postcommunist countries (e.g., Cynthia Horne, Building Trust and Democracy, 2017; Peter Rožič and Yuliy Nisnevich, “Lustration Matters,” Studies in Comparative International Development 51 [2016]: 257–85). Other findings contrast with assertions that truth commissions are less supportive of democracy (e.g., Geoff Dancy and Oskar Thoms, “Do Truth Commissions Really Improve Democracy,” Comparative Politics Studies, 55 [4] [2021]: 555–87; Tricia Olsen, Leigh Payne, and Andrew Reiter, Transitional Justice in Balance, 2010). After Authoritarianism provides an interesting addition to the growing body of literature on impact assessments of transitional justice in a field that was earlier dominated by more normative claims.
The GTJD departs in some of its measurement choices from those used in the transitional justice literature and other datasets, with possible ramifications on the direct comparability of results. First, the coding relies on passed legislation to mark the start and presence of a transitional justice measure. Because measures are often passed but not implemented, or worse, politically instrumentalized, this can overstate the impact of a measure. For example, Bulgaria is highlighted as an example of a narrow leadership purge (p. 70) based on the Panev Law, which largely targeted academics and had limited impact on political elites. Coding passed legislation can also miss informal measures that circumvent politicized efforts to block contentious reforms. For example, to get around the politically motivated ruling that lustration was unconstitutional in Bulgaria, the Bulgarian secret police file-repository agency (Dossier Commission) was empowered to administer an informal lustration variant, revealing the backgrounds of tens of thousands of former collaborators across all levels of society from bankers to priests and mayors since 2006 (ongoing). Are the democracy effects in Bulgaria due to the leadership purge coded by Nalepa, or the expansive informal lustration program publicly disclosing thousands of former collaborators (consistent with Nalepa’s lustration coding), or a combination of both? While the GTJD can potentially code multiple forms of transitional justice in a country over time, it remains difficult to parse out the causal impact of truth telling from lustration or purges when these reforms overlap conceptually, have reticulated relationships, and are temporally layered on each other.
Second, the book departs from the use of the term lustration in postcommunist states. Nalepa codes lustration as the revelation of only “secret” collaboration. However, this is not consistent with the structure of lustration laws in the region, or the definition of the term provided by Nalepa in the Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice (Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, eds., 2013), in which lustration can include both known and unknown collaboration. For example, Czechoslovakia’s vanguard lustration law included the revelation of unknown collaborators and the removal of known collaborators and high-ranking communist-era officials from positions of power. Nalepa’s oft-used example of Poland relied on revelations of unknown collaboration, but countries like Romania, Bulgaria, and Lithuania used lustration to capture both known and unknown collaborators. This raises questions about the foundational logic separating purges and lustration in the coding as well as the formal models.
Third, Nalepa argues that purges in high-capacity states lower the quality of democracy because they denude the state of trained officials that could support the new regime. The causal mechanism and the formal models hinge on bureaucratic capacity depletion. However, if one defines purges in a manner more consistent with the United Nations and the transitional justice literature, namely by their generally extralegal and politicized nature, and not by removal of “known” collaborators, the causal reasoning shifts (Alexander Mayer-Rieckh and Pablo de Greiff, eds., Justice as Prevention, 2007). Rethinking whether purges negatively affect democracy because they undermine rule-of-law principles and practices might change not only the model’s assumptions, but the high-stakes policy implication that “the pressing project for new democracies is to learn to harness usable skills of agents of the ancien régime” (p. 11).
In conclusion, there is much to appreciate in this book’s efforts to triangulate the slippery topic of transitional justice and reveal its often-illusive impact. After Authoritarianism and the GTJD on which it is based will spur continued conversations about the conditions under which personnel reforms support democratization.
