Abstract
This chapter utilises a very basic rational choice account to understand the role that democratic uncertainty plays in the mutually reinforcing relation between transitional justice and democratic transition. Rather than relying on structural explanations alone, it argues that people are not indifferent toward regime type. Rather, when faced with identical preexisting conditions, their support for democracy will increase as their perception of democratic uncertainty increases. As such, understanding the feedback loop between democratisation and transitional justice may be influenced by democratic uncertainty in two ways. First, efforts to increase democratic uncertainty, such as institutional reform, may ameliorate preexisting conditions that negatively impact transitional justice initiatives. Second, successful transitional justice should increase democratic uncertainty, for example, by increasing people’s confidence in the potential for democratic change, and thus foster the potential for such transitions to thrive and endure.
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Notes
- 1.
Paige Arthur, “How ‘Transitions’ Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2009), 324.
- 2.
Neil J. Kritz, “The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, (ed.) Neil J. Kritz (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1995), xix–xxx.
- 3.
Arthur, “How ‘Transitions’ Reshaped Human Rights,” 355.
- 4.
Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, “Introducing Uncertainty,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, (eds.) Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 66.
- 5.
Please note, I use the term authoritarian as a proxy to describe all nondemocratic regimes.
- 6.
Adam Przeworski, “Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, (eds.) Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); see also Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
- 7.
O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, “Introducing Uncertainty,” 14.
- 8.
Adam Przeworski, “Democracy as Equilibrium,” Public Choice 123, no. 3–4 (2005), 267; see also Adam Przeworski, “Self-Enforcing Democracy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, (eds.) Barry R. Weingast and Donald Wittman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 320.
- 9.
Andreas Schedler, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously: The Blurred Boundaries of Democratic Transition and Consolidation,” Democratization 8, no. 4 (2001), 2.
- 10.
Juan J. Linz, “Transitions to Democracy,” Washington Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1990), 158.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Schedler, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 2.
- 13.
Schedler, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 5.
- 14.
O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, “Introducing Uncertainty,” 3.
- 15.
Ibid., 5.
- 16.
Schedler, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously.”
- 17.
Schedler, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 4.
- 18.
Guillermo O’Donnell, “Illusions and Conceptual Flaws,” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4 (1996), 160–168.
- 19.
Schedler, “Taking Uncertainty Seriously,” 18.
- 20.
Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, 12.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Gerard Alexander, “Institutionalized Uncertainty, the Rule of Law, and the Sources of Democratic Stability,” Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 10 (2002), 1145–1170.
- 23.
Ibid., 1147.
- 24.
Ibid., 1153.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid., 1162.
- 27.
Ibid., 1146.
- 28.
Robert Alan Dahl, Ian Shapiro, and Grant Reeher, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
- 29.
Alexander, “Institutionalized Uncertainty, the Rule of Law, and Sources of Democratic Stability,” 1158.
- 30.
Youssef Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries: The Prisoners’ Dilemma and the Collapse of Democracy in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
- 31.
See, for example, ibid.
- 32.
Josep Maria Colomer, Strategic Transitions: Game Theory and Democratization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 48–53.
Bibliography
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Ferguson, P.A. (2020). The Role of Democratic Uncertainty in the Interplay Between Transitional Justice and Democratisation. In: El-Masri, S., Lambert, T., Quinn, J. (eds) Transitional Justice in Comparative Perspective. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34917-2_3
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