Why do some post-communist states limit the political participation of former authoritarian elites and their collaborators, while others do not? This article examines the adoption and implementation of lustration, a transitional-justice mechanism that vets members of previous regimes and sanctions past oppressors for abuses of human rights. I use a nested research design to construct a theory of ‘lustration politics’ that highlights the interactive effect of structural and voluntarist factors on lustration. Based on new panel data from thirty post-communist states, I first find that lustration is more likely, more extensive, and more durable when the practice of democracy is more competitive and when the level of oppression in the past authoritarian regime is higher. The article turns from statistical analysis to in-depth case studies of Georgia - which adopted lustration laws - and Russia - which failed to adopt lustration - to test the proposed theory and trace out the causal mechanism. I find that once a country achieves a sufficient level of political competition, its elites aim at using lustration as a ‘competitive weapon of elimination’ against political opponents. This study of lustration contributes to our understanding of an underexplored means used by transitional elites to gain and maintain political power.
