The hidden face of Justice: Fairness, Discrimination and Distribution in Transitional Justice Processes

Juan-Camilo Cardenas, Andrés Casas-Casas () and Nathalie Méndez Méndez ()

No 11470, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: This article contributes to the literature on the impact of transitional justice measures using microfoundational evidence from experiments. We argue that there is a distributional dilemma at the heart of transitional justice programs, given that the State must allocate goods and services both to victims and ex-combatants. Individual and social preferences over these processes matter, given that they are likely to scale up to undermine or increase public support for transitional justice programs. We offer evidence from the Colombian case, to show what we call the hidden face of justice effect, which occurs when in the transition from war to peace distributional dilemmas arise and generate a social sanction function that creates negative incentives that can affect the achievement of reintegration of ex-combatants and jeopardizes the maintenance of peace. In order to explore the microfoundations that underlie the differences between allocations to victims and ex-combatants, we use a database built by Cárdenas et. al (2008) and find that ex-combatants expect lower transfers from public officers and indeed receive lower transfers, if compared to the victims and the control groups included in the study, despite the fact that third-party observers have the power to punish senders when making offers seen by the third-party as unfair. Keywords: Transitional justice, fairness, field experiments, third-party punishment game

Keywords: Transitional justice; fairness; field experiments; third-party punishment game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D03 D63 D64 D74 H56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2013-08-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-lam
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https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8437/dcede2013-40.pdf

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Journal Article: The Hidden Face of Justice: Fairness, Discrimination and Distribution in Transitional Justice Processes (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:011470

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