Tolerating Mistakes

Monika Nalepa

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2012, vol. 56, issue 3, 490-515

Abstract: How do perceptions of procedural fairness shape the preferences that citizens have for transitional justice (TJ) in postauthoritarian countries? This article uses original opinion poll data collected in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to investigate this question. It shows that differences in the demand for TJ are explained by how citizens perceive whether the TJ process commits errors—that is, whether the innocent are condemned (falsely convicted) or the guilty are exonerated (falsely acquitted). This is so even after accounting for threat perceptions of former autocrats and voting behavior. After comparing the ways in which citizens’ perceptions of errors in the TJ process shape their demand for lustration in the three postcommunist countries, the author discusses the implications of these findings for scholars of democratic consolidation, social psychologists, and policy makers designing TJ systems.

Keywords: transitional justice; procedural fairness; lustration; false acquittal; false conviction; postcommunist Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/56/3/490.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:56:y:2012:i:3:p:490-515

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().