TY - JOUR
T1 - Democracy and Retribution
T2 - Transitional Justice and Regime Support in Postwar West Germany
AU - Capoccia, Giovanni
AU - Pop-Eleches, Grigore
N1 - Funding Information:
For comments and feedback on previous versions of this paper we thank Mark Beissinger, Jennifer Dixon, Camilo Ehrlichman, Monika Nalepa, and Elsa Voytas as well as participants in panel discussions at meetings of the American Political Science Association and the Council for European Studies. We also thank the audiences of invited talks at Princeton University, University of Texas at Austin, College of William and Mary, University of Warwick, and McGill University. The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019.
PY - 2020/3/1
Y1 - 2020/3/1
N2 - How harshly should perpetrators of past abuses be punished, to reinforce the legitimacy of a new democracy? Drawing on sociopsychological theories, we hypothesize that prodemocratic mass attitudes are favored by the perception that defendants in transitional justice trials have been punished in a way that is morally proportional to their offenses. This perception is shaped by the social categorization of defendants and the opinions about the certainty of their guilt that predominate in the mass public. When defendants are largely seen as co-ethnics and their guilt is contested, like in the West German case, prodemocratic attitudes are likely to be strengthened by lighter punishments and undermined by harsher sanctions. The analysis of subnational variation in patterns of punishment in postwar West Germany confirms this hypothesis and shows that these attitudinal effects persist in the medium term. Our findings have implications for research on transitional justice and democratization.
AB - How harshly should perpetrators of past abuses be punished, to reinforce the legitimacy of a new democracy? Drawing on sociopsychological theories, we hypothesize that prodemocratic mass attitudes are favored by the perception that defendants in transitional justice trials have been punished in a way that is morally proportional to their offenses. This perception is shaped by the social categorization of defendants and the opinions about the certainty of their guilt that predominate in the mass public. When defendants are largely seen as co-ethnics and their guilt is contested, like in the West German case, prodemocratic attitudes are likely to be strengthened by lighter punishments and undermined by harsher sanctions. The analysis of subnational variation in patterns of punishment in postwar West Germany confirms this hypothesis and shows that these attitudinal effects persist in the medium term. Our findings have implications for research on transitional justice and democratization.
KW - democratization and regime change
KW - Germany
KW - political psychology
KW - transitional justice
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U2 - 10.1177/0010414019852704
DO - 10.1177/0010414019852704
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85067895939
SN - 0010-4140
VL - 53
SP - 399
EP - 433
JO - Comparative Political Studies
JF - Comparative Political Studies
IS - 3-4
ER -