Politics of the Past, Party Competition, and Democratic Consolidation. Comparing South and East

Abstract

One of the assumptions that initially dominated the literature on democratisation is that the survival and reconversion of important segments of the authoritarian elites and the impunity of those in the previous regime that were more actively involved in repression, has had a severe impact on the quality of post-authoritarian democracies (O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead, 1996). What does it means for a new democracy to inherit an important portion of its political class from the previous authoritarian regime? The quality of democratic professional politicians with authoritarian values and low degrees of loyalty to democracy, and its impact on negative perceptions of elites by societies in transition are the most commonly mentioned elements in the literature (Dahl 1971; Linz 1978; O’Donnell 1992). Who cares about the punishment of past authoritarian elites? Certainly segments of society and elites, but politicians also care, mainly because it affects their career prospects. Democratic consolidation is by definition dominated by parties, and in certain cases, such as in central and southern Europe it is a ‘consolidation through parties’ (Morlino 1998). However, their role was underestimated by the early literature on transitional justice. We know that political parties’ support for transitional justice can be weakened by contingent political circumstances, and that the institutional incorporation of the segments of previous authoritarian elites is in many cases an objective of democratic consolidation. But even when that is not a contingency decision of pro-democratic elites in processes of transitions to democracy, the parties’ capacity to transform and survive the collapse of authoritarian regimes is a decisive element in the development of attitudes towards the past in young democracies. If in Southern Europe and Latin America scholars of democratic transitions highlight the negative character of this legacy, for some scholars studying central and eastern Europe, ‘the legacies of the past can also exert a positive influence’, and, paradoxically, ‘the forces behind the comeback of the successor parties lie in their communist heritage’ (Grzymala-Busse 2002). Transitional justice in democratisations was intimately linked with the type of transition, and the key variable seems to have been the relative strength of the political actors during that period. However, a lesson that we must take from past democratizations is that the political leadership’s priority—irrespective of the type of transition—is pro-democratic institutional reform, and not retroactive punishment (Pinto and Morlino 2011). Moreover, much of the research into transitional justice underestimates the important role of the political parties and their ability to include and remove this theme from the political agenda, regardless of its importance to segments of civil society. The aim of this panel is to discuss current efforts to analyze how the “politics of the Past” erupts in the political arena and through which agents and institutions, with a special focus on new South and eastern European Democracies. More specifically, the panel will accept papers both with empirical findings and reflections on the various methodological, theoretical and empirical dimensions of the topic. The pannel aims at excellence by striking a balance between matured and fresh input research. Well-established experts will be contacted and the remaining applications are aimed at advanced research students, hopefully coming from different academic backgrounds.

Title	Details
Crime without Punishment: Transitional Justice Derailed in the Post-Communist World	View Paper Details
Left Behind: Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE) and its ‘Historical Memory’ Agenda	View Paper Details
Lessons from the Past: East German and Polish Opposition	View Paper Details
Understanding the Impact of Transitional Justice on Peace and Democracy	View Paper Details
The Politics of the Past in Chile and the Southern Cone	View Paper Details
A Tale of Two “25th of April”: Transitional Justice and the Quality of Democracy in Italy and Portugal	View Paper Details
Historical revisionism in Argentina: The politics of historical memory	View Paper Details