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

这篇博士论文研究解决了两个相关的问题，在新的民主国家出现。 首先，为什么专制政权的继任者政治精英赞助涉及过渡司法的机构，而这些机构可能会牵连到他们？第二，如果决定参与过渡时期司法，那么哪种旨在揭露过去侵犯人权行为真相的机构更好地满足文献提出的两个规范标准：接触尽可能多的肇事者，起诉尽可能少的无辜者？1)拟议的活动的智力价值：论文的贡献，民主转型的比较政治，包括在启动应用博弈论和正式的制度分析过渡时期的正义现象。它还将导致在过渡时期司法领域首次应用量化方法。国家科学基金提供的资金将使建立第一个过渡时期司法事件时间序列/跨部门数据集和一个关于对过渡时期司法的态度调查结果的数据集成为可能，这是迄今为止在一个后共产主义国家进行的唯一一次此类调查。调查实验产生的数据将允许绘制有趣的比较真相委员会和筛选法律在后共产主义和后隔离社会的运作。2）拟议的研究的更广泛的影响：虽然拟议的研究将在东欧进行，其理论成果很可能适用于其他民主化国家，特别是拉丁美洲。本论文的研究结果对于理解新民主国家的巩固以及支持和反对独裁政权的公民之间的和解过程至关重要。分析与过去达成协议的程序以及分析其规则如何相互作用并形成选民和政治家的激励对于防止新民主国家重新陷入独裁陷阱至关重要。

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 intransitional 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.